Originally published in The Western Journal
Noah’s Ark has survived a global flood, thousands of years, and countless retellings. What it hasn’t escaped is humanity’s enduring obsession with finding it.
That obsession has sent explorers and researchers scouring mountains, analysing geological formations, and chasing tantalising clues for decades.
Now, another team is taking up the search, hoping to determine whether one particularly intriguing site could hold evidence of the vessel described in Genesis.
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Which brings the story to Turkey.
In eastern Turkey, near Mount Ararat, Noah’s Ark Scans has begun core drilling at the Durupinar formation, a 515-foot-long, boat-shaped geological feature first identified in aerial photographs in 1959.
The project is being led by Turkish archaeologist Prof Dr Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University in partnership with Noah’s Ark Scans, and has received official approval from Turkish authorities — making this expedition the first of its kind.
“This is the first permitted study at the site, conducted with oversight and involvement of leading archaeologists and scientists,” the group wrote on X.
Researchers plan to collect core samples from the formation, while a drone called GOPHER is expected to examine its interior later this week.
The team has previously pointed to ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity, and other surveys that it says revealed unusual linear features, right angles, and possible corridors beneath the formation. Soil samples have also contained higher levels of organic material inside the structure than outside it.
Noah’s Ark Scans says those findings could be consistent with a buried, decayed wooden vessel — though it acknowledges that a natural geological formation remains another possibility.
That distinction is important, because not everyone in the creationist community is convinced that Durupinar is the Ark, despite the insistence of Noah’s Ark Scans.
“This isn’t just any shipwreck. This is where creation began again… and we’re going to prove it,” the group wrote.
However, a rebuttal to this can be found in a 2025 article for Answers in Genesis. Ken Ham argued that the evidence being publicised does not establish that the formation is Noah’s vessel. Ham cited geologist Andrew Snelling, who has studied the site for decades and argued that the features seen in geophysical scans could have natural explanations.
One possibility, Snelling argued, is that the apparent structures reflect natural joints and layers within limestone, or even tunnels formed by water. The higher organic content found in the soil, meanwhile, could result from differences in the underlying rock and vegetation rather than decaying wood.
Ham also pointed to a 2007 paper by Turkish geologist Murat Avci, which concluded that the boat-shaped feature is a large block of limestone that slid downslope during geological processes.
For Ham and other skeptics of the site, those explanations mean the latest scans and samples are intriguing, but far from conclusive.
For now, the drilling will provide another opportunity to test those competing interpretations. Whether the researchers find evidence of an ancient ship, a fascinating geological formation, or something in between remains to be seen.
And even within creationist circles, the outcome carries a theological caveat: Ham himself wrote that conclusively finding the Ark would be an extraordinary archaeological discovery, but that Christians do not need to find the vessel to believe the biblical account of Noah’s Flood.
The Ark may still be hiding somewhere beneath Turkey’s mountains.
For now, however, it remains exactly what it has been for thousands of years: a mystery.
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