In September 2026, a drilling rig crawled onto a strange boat-shaped ridge in eastern Turkey in the shadow of Mount Ararat.
Some of the people on that ridge believe they are standing on Noah’s Ark.
Then about 4 to 5 m down, the drill bit broke.
The team says it hit something harder than limestone.
They say it could be petrified wood.
They hope it is part of the hull of the ark.
Most geologists have a much simpler answer.
They say it is just rock.
Here is the part that is easy to miss.
Back in 1988, another team drilled into this same ridge.
They also hit something very hard at almost exactly the same depth.
So, what did the drill really touch?
A piece of an ancient ship or a very hard rock that was always there.
The samples are now in a laboratory.
In this video, we will look at what the team found, what happened here before, and what the lab might show.
The drill that broke.
The ridge is called the Durapanar Formation.
It sits in Ara province about 29 km south of the top of Mount Ararat and only a few kilome from the border with Iran.
From the air, it looks like the outline of a giant boat.
It has a pointed front, [music] rounded sides, and a long narrow body.
In 2026, a Turkish and American team came to study it.
They stayed for about 90 days from late June to late September.
The team was led by a professor from Kumhurette University in Turkey together with an American group called Noah’s Arc Scans [music] founded by a man named Andrew Jones.
They had official permission from the Turkish government.
About 20 scientists from five countries took part.
Three documentary crews followed them.
For most of the season, the work was slow.
The team mapped the ground and scanned it with radar.
They collected around 1,000 soil samples from about 150 points.
Then in the last days of the season, the drilling began.
The team used a dry drilling system.
That means no water or other fluids were used to cool the drill.
This matters, and we will see why soon.
They drilled holes inside the boat-shaped outline.
They also drilled holes outside it as a control.
A control hole is simply a comparison.
[music] If something is special about the ridge, it should look different from the ground around it.
Some cores went as deep as 18 m.
On September 23rd, [music] the team shared the news everyone would talk about.
According to Andrew Jones, in one hole inside the formation about 4 to 5 m down, the drill stopped.
In his words, “We struck a layer so hard that the drill bit broke.”
He said it was harder than limestone.
He said it could be petrified wood or wood that has turned to stone and that it needs testing in independent labs.
The team also reported other findings.
They found empty spaces underground, one filled with mud and water.
And that is looks like a void if I water.
They found layers they describe as rich in organic material.
And in the holes inside the formation, they say they did not reach solid bedrock.
They even built a small camera robot called Gopher to explore underground spaces through the drill holes.
But here is the important part.
None of this has been tested [music] yet.
The samples are now with independent labs and universities.
They will be checked for minerals, organic content, and tiny structures under a microscope.
Some may be carbon dated.
Early results are expected over the winter with fuller findings in 2027.
The professor leading the team put it simply.
If Noah’s Ark exists, this is where it would be.
To understand why that is such a big claim, we need to go back to the beginning and to another team that drilled here long before.
The believers who tested it first.
Here is something that surprises many people.
The first scientists to drill into this ridge were not skeptics.
They were believers.
In 1987, an American geoysicist named John Bombgardner visited the site.
He worked at a major US research laboratory and he was a creationist.
He came hoping to find the ark.
Together with a Turkish geologist, he scanned the ridge with ground penetrating radar.
This tool sends signals into the ground and records the echoes that come back.
The team found a flat boundary between 4 and 8 m below the surface.
But what was it?
It could be the line where soil meets solid rock or it could be the remains of a large boat.
In their own report, they wrote that it was impossible to tell.
Their advice was simple.
Drill.
So, in the summer of 1988, they did.
Between late July and early August, they drilled four narrow cores, each about 9 cm wide, down to about 10 m.
The result was clear.
Bombgardner reported no evidence of wood, petrified or otherwise.
He later gave more detail.
In two of the holes at about 5 m down, the ground changed suddenly from mud to layered rock.
In another hole, solid rock was close to the surface.
The rock was ofite, a type of volcanic rock from the ocean floor.
He described it as very difficult to drill.
His conclusion was that the boat shape came from mud flowing around a narrow ridge of hard rock.
Another early supporter was David Foldold, a marine salvage expert who had written a book arguing for the site.
In 1994, he returned with an Australian geologist, Ian Plyr, for a television documentary.
Two years later, Fold co-wrote a paper with the geologist Lawrence Collins.
Its title says it all.
Bogus Noah’s ark from Turkey exposed as a common geologic structure.
To be fair, today’s team disagrees with the 1988 results.
They say the old cores were damaged by the water used to cool the drill and that the holes were too shallow.
Remember, the new team used dry drilling to avoid this problem.
But one fact remains.
The first people to drill here wanted to find a ship.
They hit hard rock at about 5 m.
Now, how did this ridge become famous in the first place?
For that, we go back to a map and a Turkish army captain.
A shape in a survey photo.
The story of this ridge begins with a map.
In the autumn of 1959, a Turkish army captain and mapmaker named Ilhan Durupanar was studying aerial photographs.
They were taken for Turkeykey’s national mapping survey.
On one pair of images high in the hills near the town of Dubaiut, he noticed something odd.
It was a long pointed boatlike shape in the landscape.
The photos were passed on through a Turkish officer studying in the United States to a professor at Ohio State University named Arthur Brandenburgger.
He was an expert in measuring objects from aerial images.
In November of that year, the Associated Press quoted him saying, “The shape could be a petrified boat.”
He measured it at about 137 m long and about 49 m wide.
Newspapers around the world picked up the story.
In September 1960, Life magazine ran a feature with a simple headline, Noah’s Ark.
By then, a small expedition had already visited the site in the spring of 1960.
It included an American evangelist named George Vanaman Brandenburgger himself, an archaeologist named Zekefrieded Horn, and Captain Durapanar.
They rode in with an escort of Turkish cavalry.
The soldiers dug trenches about 2 and 1/2 m deep.
The next day, they used nine sticks of dynamite to dig about 2 and 1/2 m further down.
They found nothing.
No wood, no nails, no sign of anything made by human hands.
The expedition’s report spoke of no visible archaeological remains.
Vanam’s own conclusion was blunt.
This was a freak of nature.
Even so, the captain’s name stuck to the ridge.
To this day, it is called the Durupunar Formation.
For almost 20 years, the story faded, but the photo in Life magazine had caught the eye of someone who would make it famous again.
Before we meet him, though, we need to answer a bigger question.
Why does a boat-shaped ridge matter to so many people?
Why people believe?
To understand why this ridge matters, we have to go back to the story itself.
The book of Genesis says the ark came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat.
Notice that word mountains.
In ancient times, Ararat was not one peak.
It was the name of a kingdom called Uraratu that covered much of the highlands of eastern Turkey.
As one Turkish geologist has put it, the land of Ararat is not just Mount Ararat.
It is the whole of eastern Anatolia.
The Quran names a different place.
It says the boat settled on a mountain called Aljudi.
Mount Ararat itself is a sleeping volcano about 5,000 m high.
Its last eruption in 1840 set off a deadly landslide.
For centuries, explorers have searched its icy top for the ark.
None has ever proved a thing.
The flood story is also older than the Bible.
In 1872, a scholar named George Smith translated a clay tablet from ancient Mesopotamia.
It was part of the epic of Gilgamesh.
It told of a man named Utna Pishtim who built a great boat, survived a flood, and sent out a dove, a swallow, and a raven to look for dry land.
Even older versions exist, including a tablet from around 1750 BC.
Now the numbers Genesis gives the size of the ark as 300 cubits long.
A cubit is an old unit based on the length of a forearm.
With a common cubit that is about 137 m.
With the longer Egyptian royal cubit, it is about 157 m.
The ridge has been measured at anything from 137 to 165 m depending on who did the measuring.
So the famous perfect match depends on which cubit you choose and which measurement you trust.
For many people though this is not about numbers.
It is a place of faith.
Around 25 to 30,000 visitors come each year including Christian tour groups from the United States.
The story matters deeply to Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
And that deserves respect, whatever the ridge turns out to be.
And in 1977, one visitor arrived who would never let the idea go.
Ron Wyatt’s Ark.
In 1977, an American nurse anesthetist from Tennessee named Ron Wyatt visited the ridge.
He had first seen it in the pages of life magazine.
Wyatt came back again and again in 1979, in 1984, and later.
Over time, he became sure that this was the ark.
His claims were bold.
He said he had found petrified gopher wood, which is the wood the Bible says the ark was built from.
He said he had found iron rivets and brackets and lines of iron running through the formation in a regular pattern.
He traced these lines with metal detectors and a device he called a molecular frequency generator.
He also said that large standing stones in a nearby village were the ark’s anchor stones.
His claims reached far beyond this ridge.
He also said he had found chariot wheels in the Red Sea and the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem.
These stories drew huge attention.
In 1987, a ceremony was held at the site with Turkish officials marking it as a protected area.
A visitor center followed.
Today, the ridge sits inside Mount Orarat National Park where Turkey promotes it as a natural monument and an open air museum.
That is a decision about heritage and tourism.
It is not a scientific finding.
So what did scientists find when they looked at Wyatt’s evidence?
Some of his samples were tested at a commercial laboratory in Tennessee.
The geologist Lawrence Collins reviewed the results.
He noted that the elements reported were the ones found in volcanic rock.
They were not the ones found in wood or in worked metal.
The iron brackets turned out to be weathered volcanic minerals.
Even the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, where Wyatt claimed another discovery, now displays an official sign that distances itself from his claims.
The site’s remote location near the Iranian border, also brought danger.
In 1991, Wyatt and his companions were held hostage for about 3 weeks by Kurdish separatists before being released.
He died of cancer in 1999.
His claims have been widely discredited, but his arc lives on in books, in films, and in the hopes of the team that returned with a drill in 2026.
So, if Wyatt’s evidence fell apart, what is this ridge really made of?
To answer that, we need to ask the rock, what the rock says.
So, if it is not a boat, what is it?
Here, geologists do disagree, but only about how the shape was formed.
Almost all of them agree on one thing.
It is natural.
Lawrence Collins first described it as a sincline.
That is a place where layers of rock fold downward like a trough.
Later he described it as landslide debris that flowed around a hard knob of volcanic rock and was worn into a smooth streamlined shape.
In 2007, a Turkish geologist named Murad Akai published a peer-reviewed study.
He described the formation as about 150 m long, 50 m wide, and 4 m high.
[music] In his view, it is a large block of ancient limestone that slumped and crept down a slope, sliding on weak clay.
It rode along on a landslide called the Taller Earth flow, which is about 1.2 km long.
In 2025, a geologist from Turkeykey’s National Mineral Research Agency [music] visited the site.
He also concluded it was shaped by a fold and a possible landslide.
Some of the strongest critics are people of faith themselves.
Andrew Snelling, a young earth creationist geologist, described the ridge as an uplifted block of rock.
In 2025, the ministry answers in Genesis said, “The new evidence mostly repeated what Ron Wyatt had already shared.”
And in April of 2026, the Christian scholars Wesley Huff and Jeremiah Johnston [music] said the site is not the place of Noah’s ark.
They said it without a doubt.
There are also other boatlike ridges in the same landslide prone land.
So this shape is not unique.
Why a landslide can look like a ship.
Now what about the team’s other findings?
Remember the empty spaces, the organic rich layers, and the missing bedrock.
A landslide is not a neat block of stone.
It is a jumble.
As the ground slides, rock, clay, mud, and plants get mixed and broken apart.
That leaves gaps between large pieces, and those gaps can fill with water and mud.
Plants and soil get trapped in the mix, which can look like organic rich layers.
And if the whole mass has slid down from somewhere else, then of course, the drill may not find bedrock right below it.
The bedrock is further down under the slide.
So, none of these findings is strange for a landslide.
They are what a landslide would be expected to leave behind.
The team sees it differently.
Andrew Jones says their cores and scans show no solid block of rock inside the formation which he argues goes against the limestone block idea.
Yet Jones himself has described the earth flow as a jumble of materials including volcanic rock like basaltt with a large limestone boulder full of fossils at the center.
And only one geologist, Sarra Baktin, who worked on the surveys in 1987 and 1988, has continued to support the site.
So, the rock offers a simple explanation, but the team also has scans, and those scans are what made the story go viral.
Tunnels on a screen.
Over the past 10 years, this ridge has been scanned again and again.
Each time, the results sounded dramatic.
So let us take them one at a time.
The radar scans.
In 2014, a researcher from New Zealand reported three separate layers in radar data.
In 2019, radar was used for a television documentary.
The team says it showed right angles about 7 m down.
A later review, according to Jones, suggested a tunnel-like feature about 4 m deep along the center of the formation and a void going down to about 13 m.
In August of 2026, a rock mechanics engineer named Kosro Baktar scanned the site with his own radar system.
He says it was built from technology first made for the United States Air Force.
He reported that the formation was not a simple mass of rock, that there was no clear boundary with the bedrock, and that a feature about 75 m long ran through the middle, like a tunnel or a hallway.
It all sounds exciting, but here is the catch.
Ground penetrating radar does not take pictures of objects.
It records echoes from changes in the ground, such as where clay meets rock or where wet soil meets dry soil.
What those echoes mean is always an interpretation, and none of these scans has been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
As one Turkish newspaper noted, radar signals alone do not prove that something was built by people.
Remember, too, that a landslide is full of gaps and boundaries.
Radar would find plenty of them.
The soil study in April of 2026, the claims went viral.
The team reported a study of 88 soil samples.
It found about three times more organic matter and 38% more potassium inside the formation than outside it.
Newspapers and television shows in the United States and Britain ran the story.
One segment on Fox and Friends was watched about 2 and a half million times.
And you have to explain how did an earthn formation [music] get into the shape of a ship and that is exactly 300 cubits long which is the length given in the book of Genesis in the Bible.
Within days, Christian commentators pushed back.
There is also a simpler explanation.
Andrew Snelling points out that the ridge forms a bowl that collects water.
Plants grow better inside it and plants leave organic matter behind.
So, an [music] organic signal does not have to mean rotted wood.
What this means, none of this proves the team wrong.
It simply means radar and soil tests can only point.
They cannot show us what the object is.
For that we need to touch the rock itself.
And in September, a drill did exactly that.
Harder than limestone.
Let us go back to the broken drill bit and [music] ask a simple question.
What could break it?
The team’s own words were harder than limestone.
That sounds impressive.
But rocks are measured on something called the MO scale, which ranks how hard a mineral is from 1 to 10.
Limestone is only a three.
Bassalt, a common volcanic rock, is about six.
Petrified wood, which is mostly quartz, is about seven.
So yes, petrified wood is harder than limestone, but so are many ordinary rocks.
And this ridge is full of them.
Geologists [music] who have studied it describe basalt boulders and volcanic debris mixed into the landslide.
Even Andrew Jones has said there is volcanic rock in the mix.
Now remember the depths.
In 1988, the first team hit hard.
Layered rock at about 5 meters.
In 2026, the bit broke at four to 5 meters.
Two teams, almost the same depth, two very different ideas about what lies there.
There is more to notice.
The team’s press release does not say that a piece of the hard layer itself was brought up.
And one [music] claim in the team’s own film that petrified wood is almost three times as dense as limestone [music] is simply wrong.
Their densities are about the same.
Other studies tell a similar story.
Between 2021 and 2023, two Turkish universities took about 30 rock and soil samples.
They reported clay and marine materials.
That sounds exciting until you remember that the local rocks include marine limestone full of ancient sea life.
Andrew Jones himself has mentioned fossil coral [music] in the central boulder.
In January of 2026, a university official said that so far no satisfactory evidence had been reached and that dating alone cannot show a ship is here.
So, how will a lab settle this?
Real petrified wood keeps its structure.
Under a [music] microscope, a thin slice can show wood cells, even tree rings preserved in stone.
X-ray tests can tell quartz from bay salt or limestone.
Carbon dating can help, but only up to about 50,000 years.
And wood that has fully turned to stone has lost its original carbon.
The team did one thing right.
They drilled control holes outside the formation to compare.
That is exactly what a good [music] test needs.
What real evidence looks like.
So what would real proof look like?
Not a press release, not a radar image, not a viral video.
It would look like wood cells under a microscope from a core taken deep inside the formation.
It would come from independent labs that do not know which sample came from where.
The dates would agree with each other.
The raw data would be made public, and the results would be published in a journal where other scientists can check them.
Even then, wood alone might not settle it.
The geologist who still supports the site has noted that pieces of petrified wood found here could have been carried in with the mud from somewhere else.
So, a real result would need wood that is clearly part of a structure deep inside the ridge, not just a loose piece in the mud.
What a drill core can and cannot tell us.
There is one more limit to keep in mind.
A drill core is a thin tube of ground only a few cm wide.
It can miss something that is just beside it.
A hole that finds only rock does not prove there is no ship nearby.
And a hole that finds something hard does not prove it is part of one.
That is why the control holes matter and why many samples from many places will matter more than any single one.
Two other claims are still waiting for proof.
The team says it found pieces of very old pottery.
They have not been dated or published, so for now they remain a claim, and the project is paid for [music] partly by donations.
One of its marketing staff said that when drilling began, [music] university textbooks would need to be rewritten.
That does not make the research wrong, but it is a good reason to wait for independent results before believing any headline [music] in either direction.
The team has promised to publish everything.
The lab work is happening this winter with fuller results expected in 2027.
More field seasons are planned, including the first real test of the gopher robot inside the drill holes.
And now there are two clear predictions.
The team expects to find wood.
Most geologists and the believers who drilled here in 1988 expect to find rock.
For the first time in years, this is not just an argument about shapes and shadows on a screen.
It is a test and the lab will decide.
