Noah’s Ark and the Durupınar Formation

Genesis says the ark came to rest “upon the mountains of Ararat” (Genesis 8:4). Ararat is the Hebrew name for Urartu, an ancient kingdom centered on Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey, Armenia and northwestern Iran, so the text points to a mountainous region rather than one peak; the 5,137-meter volcano now called Mount Ararat took the name later. Ancient writers looked elsewhere in the region too: Josephus, quoting the Babylonian priest Berossus, wrote that part of the ship was still shown on a mountain of the Cordyaeans, in Kurdish country.

The Durupınar formation lies beside the village of Üzengili, about 16 kilometers southeast of Doğubayazıt and some 29 kilometers south of Mount Ararat’s summit. It is a boat-shaped mound about 164 meters (538 feet) long; proponents note that this is close to the ark’s 300 cubits (Genesis 6:15). Captain İlhan Durupınar of the Turkish army noticed it in an aerial photograph taken in 1959. An expedition in 1960 dug and blasted into it, found only earth and rock, and announced that it was a natural formation.

Ron Wyatt began promoting the site as the ark in 1977. In 1985 he, the writer David Fasold and the geophysicist John Baumgardner surveyed it with metal detectors and ground-penetrating radar, and Fasold described a regular internal structure in his book The Ark of Noah (1988). A visitor center now stands beside the site.

Since 2019 Andrew Jones of Noah’s Ark Scans has worked with Turkish researchers on new ground-penetrating radar and electrical resistivity surveys, which the team reads as right angles, a central corridor and rooms below the surface. Researchers from Turkish and American universities also collected nearly 30 soil and rock samples for analysis at Istanbul Technical University, and in 2023 reported clay-like and marine material and initial dates of 3,500 to 5,000 years ago.

Geologists explain the formation differently. In 1996 Fasold, who by then had concluded it was not a boat, and the geologist Lorence Collins published a study identifying it as a natural fold in sedimentary rock. They found that a supposed iron bracket was weathered volcanic minerals, that the “metal-braced walls” were bands of iron minerals in steeply tilted layers, and that the nearby “anchor stones” were cut from local volcanic rock. Other searches have focused on the ice cap of Mount Ararat itself, where no claim has been confirmed.