Jesus warned that his return would look just like the days of Noah.
Now, a team in Turkey says they’ve drilled more than 60 feet into a boat-shaped hill and never hit bedrock.
And the project’s founder says lab results coming this winter could finally confirm it’s Noah’s Ark.
In the far east of Turkey near Mount Ararat, there’s a hill shaped like a ship about 538 ft long.
For decades, people have hiked out there convinced this is where the ark came to rest.
And now for the first time, someone has drilled straight down into it.
So, what did they actually pull out of the ground?
Is it a buried ship or is it just rock like the critics say?
We’ll go through the drilling, the soil, and what the skeptics say back.
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And let’s get started.
I’m Ryan Laauo, and here’s what actually came up out of that hole.
The man behind the project is Andrew Jones, founder of a group called Noah’s Arc Scans.
In early October 2026, he said his team had core drilled at more than 12 spots across the formation and not one of them hit bedrock.
That matters because the critic’s main explanation is that this whole thing is basically a fold of solid rock.
Instead, Jones says the drill brought up deposits of rich black soil and his team is now waiting on lab tests to measure what’s in it.
He’s hopeful because of what they found back in 2024.
They took 88 soil samples from inside and outside the outline of the boat.
According to Jones, the soil inside had about three times more organic matter and roughly 38% more potassium than the soil just outside it.
The team’s soil scientist, William Crabtree, put it simply.
If a giant wooden boat rotted here, that’s the chemistry you’d expect to find.
But there’s a problem with that.
Wood isn’t the only thing that leaves organic matter behind.
Grassroots do it.
Sheep and goats grazing do it.
Water pooling in a hollow, dropping dead plants season after season does it, too.
So, more organic material inside the outline tells you something is different inside that outline.
It doesn’t tell you what.
And Jones himself has been careful about one detail that keeps getting lost online.
Pottery has turned up at the site, but he said it was found beside the formation, not inside it.
So far, nothing reported from inside the hill has been shown to be made by human hands.
There’s one more finding people keep sharing.
In 2023, researchers from Istanbul Technical University, Agri Ibrahim Sea University, and Andrews University in Michigan tested about 30 rock and soil samples from the site.
They reported clay-like material, marine material, and signs of human activity in the area going back to somewhere between 5, 500, and 30,000 BC.
Even that team said it couldn’t claim the ark itself had been there.
People lived in this region for thousands of years.
So finding traces of them is about as surprising as finding footprints on a beach.
So the real question is what this hill actually is.
And to test that, you have to hold it up against the only blueprint we’ve got.
We’ll come back to the warning Jesus gave at the very end because it’s about something nobody out there is drilling for.
Genesis gives the measurements in chapter 6.
300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high.
A cubit was the length of a forearm, elbow to fingertip.
And that’s the first catch because forearms vary.
Use the common cubit of about 18 in and the ark comes out around 450 ft long.
Use the longer Egyptian royal cubit about 20.6 in and you get roughly 515 ft.
The durupinar formation is usually measured at about 538 ft from end to end.
So depending on which cubit you pick, the hill is either almost 90 ft too long or close enough to get people excited.
And honestly, that’s my issue with the size argument.
When you get to choose the ruler after you’ve already seen the hill, a match doesn’t prove much, though it’s a fair reason to look closer.
But Genesis gives a second detail you can’t adjust with a ruler, and that’s where the ark landed.
Genesis 8:4 says the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.
Mountains plural.
In the Hebrew Bible, Ararat names a whole kingdom, the one the Assyrians called Uraru, spread across the highlands around Lake Van in what’s now eastern Turkey and Armenia.
The single volcano we call Mount Ararat today, only picked up that name much later.
And once you see that, the other ancient accounts start lining up in a strange way.
Early Aramaic translations of Genesis, the ones read aloud in synagogues, don’t say Ararat at all.
They say Cardu, the mountains of the Kurdish highlands south of Lake Van.
A Babylonian priest named Barasus writing in the 200s SBC put the wreck in the mountains of the Cordierans, which is that same district.
And the Quran in Surah 11 says the ark settled on Aljudi, a mountain that tradition places in that same southeastern corner of Turkey.
Meanwhile, the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh lands its flood hero’s boat on a different mountain entirely, Mount Nimush.
So, three old traditions point to the Cardu district south of Lake Van.
The big volcano wins out later, and Durupanar sits about 18 miles south of the summit of Mount Ararat at around 6,300 ft on the lower slopes rather than up on a peak.
Critics say that’s a foot slope, not a mountain.
Supporters say it’s still inside the region.
Genesis describes both are true, so the location alone can’t settle the question.
So, if the measurements bend and the location is fuzzy, what’s left is the paper trail.
Who first said there’s a ship out here and what did they actually see?
The oldest claim goes back to Baras himself.
He said part of the ship was still there and that locals scraped off the black bumen coating and carried it around as charms against bad luck.
In the first century AD, the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus quoted him and added that the Armenians called the landing spot the place of descent and still showed visitors the remains.
Josephus also quotes Nicolawis of Damascus who wrote about an Armenian mountain called Baris where the timbers were kept for a long time.
Notice the pattern here.
Every writer in that chain is passing on what somebody else said.
None of them says I went there and touched it.
Jump ahead to 1,948.
After an earthquake in the area, a local Kurdish farmer reportedly noticed a strange boat shape in the ground near the village now called Uzenili.
In 1959, Turkish army captain Ilhan Dupinar spotted it on an aerial photograph, and the site has carried his name ever since.
In September 1960, Life magazine ran the picture.
That same month, an expedition that included Durupanar himself went out to dig.
They spent two days digging and even used dynamite inside the formation.
All they found was soil and rocks.
You’d think that would have ended it, but it didn’t.
In 1985, an amateur archaeologist, Ron Wyatt, came back to the site with a salvage expert, David Facold, and a geoysicist.
Facult was convinced.
In 1988, he published a book called The Ark of Noah, arguing this was the real thing.
Wyatt promoted the site for years, including a set of big stones nearby that he said were anchor stones from the ark.
Flat slabs with a hole cut through one end, the kind ancient sailors dragged behind a ship to keep it steady.
But stones like that also turn up across the region, and several of these were sitting in an old Christian cemetery.
Even the radar from those years was thin.
The geologist Andrew Snelling later reported that Wyatt and Fold went in without a permit and made 10 passes in about 30 minutes, only over the pointed end everyone calls the bow.
And the claims didn’t stay at Dupinar.
In April 2010, a team from a Hong Kong group, Noah’s Ark Ministries International, held a press conference saying they were 99.9% sure they’d found wooden compartments high up on Mount Ararat itself above 12,000 ft.
Then an archaeologist who’d worked with that same group, Randall Price, wrote in an email that leaked to the press that he believed it was a hoax with local men hauling old timber up the mountain.
He publicly urged the team to hand their samples to independent scientists.
Then in 2019, the Jones team ran ground penetrating radar over Durupanar and started reporting what they read as corridors and chambers underground.
Jones has said the goal is to drill access holes and lower a camera into whatever is down there without tearing the site apart.
That’s the line that runs straight to this year’s drill.
That’s the believer’s side of the paper trail.
But one name in it did something nobody saw coming.
David Fold, the salvage expert who wrote the book on Durupanar, changed his mind.
In September 1994, he walked the site with an Australian geologist, Ian Plyr, and came away convinced it wasn’t a boat.
Two years later, in 1996, he co-wrote a paper with the geologist Lawrence Collins in the Journal of Geoscience Education.
The title called it a bogus Noah’s Arc and a Common Geological Structure.
Their explanation was a sincline.
Picture rock layers bent downward into a trough like a sheet of paper pressed down in the middle.
Wear away the edges of one over thousands of years and you can end up with a long pointed outline that looks a lot like a hull and they went through the evidence point by point.
The iron brackets were weathered volcanic minerals.
The lines that look like metal bracraced walls were natural concentrations of two iron minerals lemonite and magnetite sitting in steeply tilted rock layers.
The piece shown as fossilized gopherwood bark was a metamorphic rock called peritite and the anchorstones near the village of Kazan were local andite.
So nobody had to haul them in from Mesopotamia.
In April 1997, testifying under oath in an Australian court case, Fasold repeated those doubts in two very blunt words.
And then it gets messier.
His biographer June Daws later wrote that he came back around to believing in the site before he died in 1998.
So the man most responsible for the theory ended up on both sides of it depending on which year you asked him.
And the doubt doesn’t only come from secular geologists.
Answers in Genesis.
The creationist ministry that defends a literal worldwide flood files Dupinar under arguments Christians should avoid and it republished Snowelling’s report.
Their writers point to a Turkish Air Force photo showing three more boatshaped formations in the same kind of mud flow on the slopes of nearby Lesser Ararat.
Three more boat shapes in the same mud.
That’s hard to get past.
So this year’s question gets sharper.
If the shape can happen naturally, the only thing that can settle Dupinar is what’s inside it.
And that’s what this winter’s lab work is supposed to answer.
But step back for a second.
Even if the hill turns out to be rock, that wouldn’t touch the bigger question.
If a flood big enough to inspire all these stories really happened, it should have left marks somewhere else.
And people have gone looking for it.
In the 1990s, two marine geologists from Columbia University argued that the Black Sea used to be a freshwater lake sitting well below sea level.
Then around 7,600 years ago, by their estimate, the rising Mediterranean broke through at the Boserus and poured in.
In 1999, Robert Ballard, the explorer who found the Titanic, searched off the Turkish coast near Sinaop and found an ancient beach about 550 ft underwater.
The freshwater shells on it dated back about 7,500 years.
The saltwater species only showed up later.
And in 2000, Ballard went back and reported something bigger.
A structure on the seafloor that he said was clearly built by humans, matching stone age buildings from inland Turkey.
If he’s right, people really were living on land that the sea later swallowed.
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The Black Sea flood was real, but its size is still argued over.
Other researchers studying the opposite shore found the old water line was much shallower than 550 ft, which would make the event a lot less dramatic.
But there’s another kind of evidence that doesn’t depend on sonar at all, and it’s written in clay.
In 2014, the British Museum put a small tablet on display about the size of a phone.
Irving Finkele, the curator who translated it, called it the Ark tablet.
A man brought it in after inheriting it from his father who’d picked it up in the Middle East after World War II.
It dates to the old Babylonian period, somewhere between 1,900 and 1,700 BC.
And it’s a Babylonian god giving a flood hero step-by-step instructions to build an ark.
Rope, wooden ribs, and a coat of bumen.
The surprise is the shape.
It’s round, a giant version of the river coracles people used in Iraq.
About 2/3 the area of a soccer field.
And for the animals, it uses a word that means two by two.
Now, this is where people split.
Finkele’s view is that the Babylonian flood story is older and that it reached the Jewish exiles in Babylon in the 6th century BC.
Plenty of Christians read it the other way around.
To them, Genesis preserves the original event, and the Babylonian versions are distorted copies of it.
Finkele himself doesn’t think the tablet proves the biblical ark existed.
But neither side disputes the oddest part, which is how much the two stories share.
Now connect the dots.
Genesis 6:14 tells Noah to coat the ark with pitch inside and out.
The Babylonian tablet coats its ark in bumen.
And Barrosus says people were scraping bumen off the wreck to wear his charms.
Three completely different sources.
And the one detail they all agree on is that black waterproofing, not the size, not the shape, not the mountain, the tar.
Betumin seeps naturally out of the ground in Iraq and people there sealed their boats with it for thousands of years.
So the tar ties every version of this story to real Mesopotamian boat building.
It’s also a useful clue because tar and rotted wood both leave chemistry behind.
But before we get to the lab, there’s a problem anyone trying to build a real ark would run into.
Wood has a size limit, and we know roughly where it is.
The biggest wooden ship ever built was a sixmasted schooner called the Wyoming, launched in Maine in 1909.
On paper, she was 450 ft long, but that counts the long spars sticking off both ends.
Her actual hull was about 330 ft.
Even at that size, she flexed in rough water, her planks twisted, and she leaked so badly her pumps had to keep running.
Her builders added around 300 tons of iron and steel straps to hold her together.
In March 1924, she went down in a storm off Cape Cod with her entire crew.
The ark in Genesis would be a wooden hull 450 to 515 ft long.
That’s longer than the Wyoming’s hull with no steel at all.
Believers have a real answer to this, and it’s worth hearing.
The ark wasn’t built to sail anywhere.
It had no destination and no need for speed.
It only had to float and ride out the water.
And a long box-shaped hull handles that very differently from a narrow schooner cutting through waves.
Skeptics answer that a storm big enough to flood the world wouldn’t exactly be calm water.
If something that size really rotted inside that hill, it wouldn’t just leave a smudge of dark soil.
It would leave a very specific chemical signature.
And that’s what the lab is looking for.
So, here’s what this winter’s tests can and can’t tell us.
Starting with the radar.
Ground penetrating radar doesn’t take pictures of rooms.
It sends pulses into the ground and records where they bounce back, wherever one material changes to another.
Then somebody has to interpret those reflections.
That’s why one team can look at a scan and see a hallway more than 250 ft long, while a geologist looks at the same kind of data and sees layers of sediment in a fold.
Drilling is different because now you’ve got actual dirt in a jar.
The 2026 field season was coordinated by Professor Sanker Atila of Civas Kamhurette University with around 20 scientists and students from five countries starting on June 29.
They mapped the site, ran radar, and drilled.
They even brought a small underground robot called Gopher built by an Australian engineer, Robert Ross, who adapted it from robots he’d made for exploring wombat and armadillo burrows.
So, what result would actually mean something?
Higher organic matter on its own won’t do it.
You’d want the chemistry of that material.
Wood contains lignen, and the makeup of lignen can tell woody plants apart from grasses.
You’d want radiocarbon dates on that material, and you’d want those dates to cluster together instead of spreading across thousands of years.
And you’d want something shaped by human hands, a joint, a peg, a cut edge.
If the samples come back with grass-type chemistry, scattered dates, and no worked wood, it’s most likely a hollow in a mud flow that collected plant matter for a very long time.
If they come back with old wood chemistry, tightly grouped dates, and anything cut by tools, that would be a huge find, and you’d hear about it everywhere.
The university says the first year result should come out as a book and three international papers, with the full project running into 2027.
But even if that lab report landed tomorrow, it still wouldn’t answer the warning.
Jesus actually gave.
In Matthew 24, his disciples ask him about the end of the age.
And just before he brings up Noah, he says, “Nobody knows the day or the hour, not even the angels.”
So the comparison that follows is about timing, about something arriving when people aren’t expecting it.
Then he answers with Noah.
He says that before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving their children in marriage, right up to the day Noah went into the ark.
In the Old King James wording, “They knew not until the flood came and took them all away.”
Luke 17 records the same warning and pairs it with the story of Lot.
Look at what he picks out.
He doesn’t list their crimes.
He doesn’t mention the size of the boat or where it landed.
He describes normal life, dinner, weddings, people doing ordinary things while something enormous was being built where anyone could walk up and look at it.
And that’s what flips this whole search around.
In Genesis, the ark sat out in the open.
It was the biggest construction project anyone around Noah had ever seen, and it probably stood there for years.
What the people in Jesus’s story were missing wasn’t evidence.
It was attention.
The Apostle Peter takes the same idea further.
In his second letter, he describes scoffers in the last days, saying that everything carries on just as it always has since the beginning of creation.
And his reply is the flood.
The world they’re so sure never changes, he says, was once overflowed with water and perished.
For the New Testament writers, Noah’s story pointed past the boat at the assumption that tomorrow will look exactly like today.
So whatever the lab says about Dupinar, the warning doesn’t rise or fall on a soil sample.
Whichever way the samples go, people on both sides will say they saw it coming, and the argument will pick up right where it left off.
And if I’m reading Matthew 24, right, his point is that either way, most people will go right back to dinner.
Whether you read that as faith or as an old story, it’s a strange thing to sit with.
Jesus speaking in the first century described people so busy with ordinary life that they missed what was being built in front of them.
And this winter, there’s a drill corps sitting in a lab in Turkey with a lot of people waiting to hear what it says.
I’m Ryan Laauo.
There are plenty more mysteries from the Bible in the ancient world waiting on this channel, and I’ll keep digging into every one of them with
