Durupınar Site

Durupınar site is a boat-shaped rock formation in eastern Turkey that Ron Wyatt promoted from 1977 as the fossilized remains of Noah's Ark, as some still do. Genesis says only that the Ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Genesis 8:4); where in that land it settled is taken up under Mountains of Ararat. Writing in Creation magazine, John Morris and Andrew Snelling judged the formation natural, and Snelling wrote that core drilling had "ruled out any petrified Ark or its remains within this site". David Fasold, who had once taken it for the Ark, co-wrote with Lorence Collins a 1996 study concluding that it is natural rock. The formation lies near Doğubayazıt and the villages of Üzengili and Telçeker, east of Nasar and north of the border with Iran. Collins places it 17 miles (27 kilometers) southwest of Mount Ararat and gives the elevation of its center as 6,625 feet. Collins gives its length as 515 feet (157 meters), which he notes "circumstantially is the same length as 300 Egyptian cubits"; Genesis gives the Ark a length of 300 cubits (Genesis 6:15). An older reference work states that "the length of a cubit is unknown, but is commonly believed to be eighteen inches".

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History of investigation

The formation is named after İlhan Durupınar, a Turkish Army captain who first saw its boat shape on a Turkish Air Force aerial photograph taken during a mapping project in 1959. In 1960 a joint Turkish-American expedition that included Durupınar surveyed the site. Collins and Fasold record that investigators who reached the site found its boat-like appearance to be only superficial. Collins and Fasold record that Turkey's Ministry of Cultural Affairs, together with the High Commission on Ancient Monuments, declared the area a national park to protect it from exploitation. A visitors' center was built nearby, and Collins notes that a sample of black rock described as petrified wood in the Visitors Center is basalt, with tiny white plagioclase laths.

Ron Wyatt began investigating the site in 1977. In 1985 David Fasold and the geophysicist John Baumgardner joined him, and Fasold made nine trips in the following years. In the summer of 1994 Ian Plimer, a professor of geology, also examined the site. By 1996 Fasold had come to the view that the formation was not a boat.

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Geology

In 1996 Fasold and Lorence Collins published a study in the Journal of Geoscience Education concluding that the formation is a natural rock structure that had been misidentified as Noah's Ark. Collins and Fasold read the lines taken for metal-braced walls as natural bands of limonite and magnetite within steeply tilted sedimentary layers on the flanks of a doubly plunging syncline. Collins and Fasold also reported that no fossilized wood, elemental carbon, or wood or reed fragments had been found with these walls or anywhere else during trenching or core drilling. Fasold nonetheless suggested that the structure, while not Noah's Ark, may very well be the site the ancients regarded as "the ship of the Deluge". In a later postscript Collins revised the 1996 model, writing that the site "cannot be a doubly-plunging syncline" and is instead a natural structure shaped like a streamlined boat. In a 2016 paper in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, Collins concluded that the partial boat shape was produced as landslide debris from the mountains to the south eroded the bedrock.

Writing in Creation magazine, John Morris in 1990 and Andrew Snelling in 1992 both described the formation as a stable area around which slowly moving material flows. Morris compared this to water flowing around a rock in a stream bed, which gives the site its streamlined shape. Snelling took the stable core to be a raised block of basement rock, limestone and basalt among it, left standing by erosion, with loose soil and crushed rock creeping downhill around it "much as a glacier flows". In June 2025 Snelling quoted a description of the structure as a large block of Miocene limestone, bounded by discontinuities, that slumped and then crept down the slope on weak Eocene clays.

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Recent work

In August 2020 Collins, discussing the subsurface images project of the Noah's Ark Scans team, judged that there is "no possibility that actual empty spaces (rooms) or walls of former rooms occur below the upper surface of the supposed ark". In June 2025, in a statement published by Answers in Genesis, Snelling responded to reports of geophysical features within the structure, writing that "None of these reports objectively assess the raw geophysical data by canvasing other interpretations". Snelling suggested that the features might reflect jointing and layering in the limestone, or even a tunnel or cave dissolved out by surface and ground water, and that another interpretation could point to the different rock inside the structure (limestone) and outside it (mudflow debris).

As of October 2026, Sivas Cumhuriyet University was running a research project at the site, directed by Professor Cenker Atila of its Department of Archaeology, with Noah's Ark Scans taking part and under permits from two Turkish ministries; the project's results have not yet been published. In a field season that began at the end of June 2026 and that the university reported complete in September 2026, Atila's team surveyed with ground-penetrating radar and drilled cores inside and outside the formation. In September 2026 Sivas Cumhuriyet University announced that the project had been carried out under an official approval dated 21 May 2026, that 366 core samples had been delivered to the laboratories of Ankara Yıldırım Beyazıt University for carbon-isotope analysis and dating, and that comprehensive evaluation and reporting of the data were planned to continue until mid-2027; nothing from this work has yet been published or peer reviewed. Between August and October 2026, the project's director, Cenker Atila, and Andrew Jones of Noah's Ark Scans claimed that samples from inside the formation held more carbon and organic matter than samples from outside it, and Noah's Ark Scans read a subsurface anomaly about 250 feet long, running through the middle of the formation, as resembling a "tunnel or hallway"; these are the team's claims and have not been published in a scientific journal or peer reviewed. In late September 2026 the project's director, Cenker Atila, and a deputy head of the project, Andrew Jones, both rejected claims that the Ark had been found: Atila called headlines announcing the Ark's discovery misleading, said such claims did not fully reflect the actual results and said the soil analysis was still going on, and Jones said that some claimed it had been 100 percent confirmed while others described discoveries the team had never told them about, and that no such statement could be made until the laboratory studies and final reports were done; none of the project's results has yet been published or peer reviewed. In October 2026 Jones told Fox News that the team's pottery lay beside the formation, not within it, and had been dated only tentatively, by its style, to between the early Copper Age and the Iron Age; its age has not been tested in a laboratory, and the find has not been published or peer reviewed.