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Japanese No. Nobody has shown that Noah’s ark has been found. In 2026 a Turkish university team and a US group drilled into the boat-shaped Durupınar formation near Mount Ararat, and so far they have identified no ancient wood and dated nothing. The “100% confirmed” headline rested on a claim credited to the team, and no laboratory stood behind it.
Noah built his ark for “events as yet unseen,” Hebrews says (Hebrews 11:7). The people searching for it now are asking for the opposite: wood a laboratory can date and data other scientists can read. That is a fair thing to ask of a mound in Turkey, and so far it has not been given.
The latest, as of 17 October 2026
Field work at Durupınar ended at the end of September, and the soil samples have gone to laboratories. No results have been published. Andrew Jones, the founder of Noah’s Ark Scans and deputy head of the project, said in an interview on 12 October that the engineer Khosrow Bakhtar’s final radar report will come out at the end of November. Jones expects the project’s final report in April or May 2027, and the university says the evaluation will continue into 2027.
On 15 October the project took its work to the opening day of the 8th International Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark Symposium at Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University. Professor Cenker Atila, who leads the project, said the first fifth of Bakhtar’s radar results show a long, narrow corridor through the formation with room-like spaces on either side, and three layers. He linked the layers to the three decks of the ark described in Scripture. In the same talk he said the data are not yet enough for a firm conclusion and the structures may be geological. A small amount of burnt wood, he said, had gone to laboratories in France and Turkey to identify the tree and its age. Carbon-14 results are expected from France in about 15 days, which would be around the end of October, and from Turkey in about three months. The programme also lists a paper by Jones and two colleagues for 16 October, titled “Soil samples support the hypothesis that the Durupinar could be the remnants of an ancient decayed wooden boat.” No report of that paper had appeared by 17 October. All of this is the team reporting on its own work to a conference. None of it is a laboratory result.
The map gathers every major search for the ark: where each one looked, what it claimed and what came of it, up to the results still to come at Durupınar.
What did the 2026 drilling at Durupınar find?
Two partners did the work. Professor Atila, of the archaeology department at Sivas Cumhuriyet University, leads the project, and about 20 scientists from five countries took part. Noah’s Ark Scans, a US Christian group that has studied the site since 2019, works with the university team, and Jones is the project’s deputy head. Turkish authorities approved the work in June, and Atila says field work began on 28 June. Noah’s Ark Scans raises its share of the cost through a GiveSendGo appeal, which stood at $104,000 of a $600,000 goal on 27 September.
First came the radar. Bakhtar surveyed the formation with his company’s BakhtarRadar, a subsurface radar system, and in late August the team announced strong anomalies and distinct layers inside the formation. The Daily Mail described the radar results as “straight lines, right-angle intersections and large cavity-like spaces.” In September the drills went in, reaching depths of about 20 metres. The team posted video from Gopher, a small underground robot with a camera, and said it showed no rock or bedrock in the structure; no one outside the team has confirmed that. Fox News reported more than 300 soil samples, taken inside and outside the formation, and Azernews put the number at about 1,000.
So far the team reports four findings. Jones says that “no bedrock or solid limestone” has been found in the holes drilled inside the formation, and that the cores brought up soil with some large blocks of rock. Some cores held dark soil rich in organic matter, and earlier sampling in 2024 had found three times as much organic matter inside the formation as outside it. In one hole a drill bit broke on a hard layer about four to five metres down; Jones says it could be petrified wood, or it could be a block of rock. And pottery turned up beside the formation, though not in it, which Jones says has been tentatively dated by its style from the Copper Age through the Iron Age.
Jones believes the formation is the ark. “I firmly believe the Durupınar Formation represents the buried remains of Noah’s Ark,” he told the Daily Mail, and he has said that this belief “is exactly why we want to put it through the strongest scientific testing we can.” He is just as clear about what has not been found. “We have not identified any material as ancient wood or established its age,” he told Newsweek on 28 September, because no laboratory results were in. When he called the layers the possible remains of the ark, he said, he was “describing the hypothesis we are testing, not a finding,” and “even identifying ancient wood would not by itself establish human construction.” On 30 September he said: “This could be a natural formation, or it could be a man-made structure.” He has also warned against claims circulating on social media and in some news outlets before the studies are finished. That is an honest way to hold a hope.
Where did “100% confirmed” come from?
On 23 September the Daily Mail ran the headline “Noah’s Ark resting place ‘100% confirmed’ after 4,300 years,” and the story went round the world. The article, as it now reads, makes a narrower claim: that the team “claims it has ‘100 percent confirmed’ that the mound is not a natural geological feature but a ‘man-made object.’” The same article said the researchers had not confirmed the material is wood, “nor have they scientifically dated anything recovered from drilling to 4,300 years ago.” Two days later the paper quoted the head of marketing and fundraising for Noah’s Ark Scans, writing on X: “Scientists confirm the formation is 100 percent not geological.”
So the “100%” was credited to the team as a whole. No project scientist has been quoted saying it. The only wording anyone can trace is that post, which credits unnamed “scientists,” and no laboratory has published anything behind it. Even taken at its word, it claimed only that the mound is not natural. It did not claim a ship, still less Noah’s; the headline made that leap. On 30 September Jones himself objected that “some say it has been 100 percent confirmed,” and said: “There are still laboratory studies to be conducted and final reports to be written.”
What is the Durupınar formation?
Durupınar is a boat-shaped mound in Ağrı province in eastern Turkey, about 18 miles (29 kilometres) south of Mount Ararat. David Fasold measured it in the 1980s at about 164 metres, or 538 feet. Genesis gives the ark’s length as 300 cubits. With the common cubit of about 18 inches that is about 450 feet; with the Egyptian royal cubit of about 20.6 inches it is about 515 feet, or 157 metres. Some reports give that 157-metre figure as the mound’s own length. So whether the mound “matches” the ark depends on which cubit you choose. The numbers are set out in how big Noah’s ark was.
The shape was first noticed in 1959 by İlhan Durupınar, a captain in the Turkish army, on aerial photographs taken for NATO’s Geodetic Survey of Turkey, and it carries his name. In 1960 an expedition that included Captain Durupınar dug there for two days, even using dynamite, and found only “dirt, rocks and more dirt.” Its leader concluded that the formation “was a freak of nature and not man-made.” In the late 1970s Ron Wyatt, an American nurse anesthetist and amateur archaeologist, began promoting the site as the ark, and Turkey later declared the area a national park. David Fasold argued in a 1988 book that the formation was Noah’s ark. Then in 1996 he and the geologist Lorence Collins concluded that it was “a completely natural rock formation.”
What do geologists say it is?
Trained geologists have generally agreed with Collins and Fasold. Their 1996 paper found that the supposed fossil gopherwood bark was a crinkled rock called peridotite, and that the “anchor stones” Wyatt promoted were cut from local andesite, a volcanic rock, and had not been brought from Mesopotamia. In 2007 the Turkish geologist Murat Avcı described the mound as a large block of Miocene limestone that slumped and crept downhill on weak clays, its shape worn by the earthflow passing around it.
The 2026 team answers that its holes found no bedrock or solid limestone inside the outline, which Jones says challenges the claim that the mound is simply limestone or bedrock. He has also said that four cores drilled outside the formation hit no bedrock either. Jones has set out what the laboratory tests are looking for: “If the interior material matches the surrounding earthflow, that supports a natural origin; if it differs in ways the natural setting cannot explain, that would be significant.” Those results are the next step.
What do Christians say about the Durupınar claims?
Some of the firmest answers came from Christians. Answers in Genesis, which teaches that the flood covered the whole earth and runs the life-size Ark Encounter in Kentucky, said on 6 October: “we don’t believe Noah’s Ark has been found at the Durupinar site.” In 2025 its geologist Andrew Snelling set out why. Genesis says the ark landed “on the mountains of Ararat” on day 150 of the flood, and the tops of the surrounding mountains were seen 74 days later, so the ark grounded high up; the formation sits in a valley about 1,000 metres deep on the southern slopes of Mount Ararat. The rock inside is limestone. Soil tests finding more organic carbon inside the formation only repeat results from the 1980s. And any reading of radar images “involves assumptions, not least an expectation or a prior concept of what one is hoping to find.” The Institute for Creation Research, also a young-earth ministry, wrote in 2020: “We don’t yet have Noah’s Ark, and it looks unlikely to turn up.”
Other evangelicals said the same. In April 2026 the apologist Wesley Huff argued that no one on the Noah’s Ark Scans team was a formal archaeologist, pointed to the limits of ground-penetrating radar, and wrote that “the precise location of Ararat remains unknown.” The New Testament scholar Jeremiah Johnston called reports of the discovery “1,000 percent inaccurate” and said ground-penetrating radar is “famously inaccurate” in mountainous regions. Jones replies that the team now includes four professional archaeologists and three students. On 12 October Chris Sinkinson wrote in Premier Christianity, “Noah’s Ark has not been found,” and called the story “a cautionary tale for Christian credibility.” Christians who care about the truth of Genesis were the first to say the ark has not been found.
Behind the dispute over one hill lie different readings of the flood itself. Answers in Genesis reads Genesis 6 to 9 as a flood over the whole globe. The ministry Reasons to Believe holds that the flood “wiped out all humanity and associated animals, save those on Noah’s ark, without covering the globe.” BioLogos, a Christian organisation that accepts mainstream science, says there has never been a global flood and reads the story as “an interpretation of an actual historical event retold in the rhetoric and theology of ancient Israel.” The notes in the Catholic bishops’ New American Bible describe the account as a composite of two sources woven together, trace it to an ancient Mesopotamian flood tradition, and ask readers to take the story “as a coherent narrative.”
Has anyone claimed to find Noah’s ark before?
Many times. Each claim drew headlines, and none has been confirmed.
| When | The claim | What came of it |
|---|---|---|
| 1949 | A shape high on the north-west side of Ararat in photographs taken by a US intelligence agency, later called the “Ararat anomaly” | Possibly nothing more than a natural rock formation |
| 1955 and 1969 | Fernand Navarra’s wood from Ararat, said to be about 5,000 years old | Later tests dated it to well under 2,000 years old |
| 1959 to 1960 | The Durupınar shape on an aerial survey photograph | A 1960 dig found “dirt, rocks and more dirt” |
| Late 1970s to 1999 | Ron Wyatt’s petrified wood, iron brackets and “anchor stones” at Durupınar | Geologists found the “bark” and the “anchor stones” were rock |
| 1996 | David Fasold, once Durupınar’s champion, studies it with Lorence Collins | Their paper calls it a natural formation |
| 2010 | Wooden chambers about 4,000 metres up Ararat, announced in Hong Kong as “99.9 percent” certain | A former team member, Randall Price, alleged a hoax with wood carried up the mountain |
| 2019 to 2026 | Noah’s Ark Scans: radar lines and right angles, then drilling | No wood identified and nothing dated so far |
What would count as proof?
The team itself has named the first step: material identified as wood and given a date. A convincing case would need more than that. It would need radiocarbon dates on wood or worked timber from inside the formation, from laboratories that publish their methods. It would need the radar data released so that other specialists can read it, the core records published, and papers that geologists and archaeologists outside the project have reviewed. Jones says independent peer review “is still ahead.” Even then, an ancient wooden structure would still have to be tied to the ark of Genesis, and that is a further step.
None of that has happened yet. Until it does, the honest answer is the one the team gave Newsweek: no wood identified and no age established.
Where does the Bible say the ark came to rest?
Genesis names a region, and no single peak: the ark rested “upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4). “Mountains” is plural, and elsewhere in the Bible Ararat is a land. The sons of the Assyrian king Sennacherib “escaped into the land of Ararat” (2 Kings 19:37), which the King James Version translates “the land of Armenia,” and Jeremiah summons against Babylon “the kingdoms, Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz” (Jeremiah 51:27). Ararat was the ancient kingdom of Urartu in eastern Turkey. As the biblical scholar Jack Sasson told National Geographic, “it’s only later that people identified Mount Ararat with Urartu.” The New American Bible’s note puts it in one sentence: “There is no Mount Ararat in the Bible.”
So Genesis does not point to the snow-capped volcano that now carries the name. The Quran says the ark came to rest on al-Jūdī, which a later tradition places at Mount Judi in south-east Turkey, and the programme of the October 2026 symposium in Ağrı lists papers on both mountains. Armenian tradition has looked to Ararat itself since at least the 11th or 12th century, though its oldest telling of the Jacob story, written about 470, set his mountain in Korduk’, south of Lake Van. Jacob of Nisibis was a fourth-century bishop who attended the Council of Nicaea in 325. The Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin, the centre of the Armenian Apostolic Church, keeps a cross-shaped fragment of wood from the ark that, in its own telling, an angel placed beneath his head as he slept at the foot of the mountain.
Does Christian faith depend on finding the ark?
No, and the Christians who read the flood story most literally say so first. Answers in Genesis puts it plainly: “our faith in God’s Word does not rest on finding the Ark (as exciting as that would be!)—it rests on the truth of Scripture.”
The New Testament treats Noah as a man who trusted God for what he could not yet see: “By faith Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear constructed an ark for the saving of his household” (Hebrews 11:7). And it reads the ark as a sign of something greater. Peter writes that in the ark “a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through water,” and then: “Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you … through the resurrection of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 3:20–21). For the first Christians the ark pointed to the risen Christ, and to the rescue it pictured, more than to a hull on a mountain.
They painted Noah on the walls of the catacombs. He stands alone in an ark drawn as a small square chest with a lid, his arms raised in prayer, as the dove returns with the olive branch.
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