Has Noah’s Ark finally been found?
This year, for the first time ever, scientists drilled into the one place many people believe it is buried.
A mountain side in eastern Turkey, 3 km from the border with Iran, 20 scientists, [music] five countries, 90 days.
They scanned it with radar.
They took about a thousand soil samples.
[music] And the drill brought up something nobody expected.
Because the hill they drilled is shaped like a boat about 515 ft long, pointed at one end, curved like a hull.
Some call it the ark.
Others call it a landslide.
By the end of this video, you’ll know what the evidence actually says.
So far.
[music] To understand why anyone would drill into a mountain looking for a boat, you have to start with a story.
One that is older than the Bible.
A great flood, one family, one boat, animals saved from the water.
It is one of the most widespread stories humans have ever told.
And here’s something most people forget.
Almost every version ends the same way with the boat coming to rest on a mountain.
But which mountain?
That is where it gets complicated.
For centuries, explorers climbed peaks looking for old wood, planks, beams, anything.
Every few years, someone claims to have found it.
None of it has ever been confirmed.
The oldest written flood stories come from Mesopotamia from people who lived beside two great rivers and knew exactly what rising water could do.
Gilgamesh says Mount Nimosh.
Genesis says the mountains of Ararat.
The Quran says Aljudi.
The Armenian church points to one peak, Mount Ararat itself.
And in India, the shadow path of Brahmanana says Manu’s boat settled on the northern mountain.
Genesis is the only one that gives exact measurements.
300 cubits long, 50 wide, 30 high.
Remember that first number, it comes back later.
Three decks, a door in the side, a window near the top built to carry every kind of land animal 2x two.
In modern units, that is somewhere between 135 and 160 m, depending on which cubit you use.
Built from wood by hand.
Now, let’s be fair.
Even modern ship builders struggled at that size.
The longest wooden ship ever built, the Wyoming, was 450 ft long.
It bent and leaked in heavy seas and sank in 1924.
But in Turkey, the ark is not only a story.
It is geography.
Because every tradition that names Ararat points to a mountain inside Turkeykey’s borders.
Genesis says that when the water went down, the ark came to rest.
Not on a single peak, but on the mountains of Ararat, the old name of a whole kingdom called Uratu.
That kingdom sat right here, eastern Turkey, Armenia, and the edge of Iran.
And at its heart stands Mount Ararat, more than 5,000 m high.
In May 1948, local reports say heavy rain and earth shook the slopes about 30 kilometers south of that peak.
When the mud settled, something new was showing.
11 years later, in 1959, a Turkish army captain named Ilhend Dorupanar was checking aerial survey photos.
And on one of them he saw a boat.
It measured about 515 feet, 157 m.
That is almost exactly 300 long Egyptian cubits.
Think about that for a second.
Not everyone agreed.
The Quran names Al Judy, which many link to Mount Judy far to [music] the south near the Iraqi border.
So even believers don’t agree on the spot.
In 1960, an American team went to the site.
They dug trenches.
They even used dynamite.
They found soil in rock.
Their verdict was natural.
Geologists have a name for this kind of shape.
When layers of rock are squeezed into a fold, then worn down by erosion.
They can leave a long pointed outline.
It happens all over the world.
But in 1977, an American named Ron Wyatt revived the claim.
A salvage expert, David Foldold, brought radar and became the site’s biggest champion.
Then in 1996, he co-wrote a paper calling it a common geologic structure.
What changed his mind?
The details.
The iron brackets turned out to be natural minerals.
The ribs were volcanic rock, no petrified wood, no carbon from a ship.
Turkish geologist Murad Aja offers a simpler idea.
A block that slid down the slope in a landslide shaped by mud flowing around it.
So, case closed, right?
Not quite.
Near the sight stand huge stones with holes cut through them.
Ark hunters called them anchor stones.
Geologists say they are local volcanic rock.
The argument never ended.
For decades, it was the same loop.
Believers saw a ship.
Geologists saw a rock.
And nobody had gone deep enough to prove either side until a new generation of tools arrived.
Tools that can see under the ground without digging and measure what is inside a handful of soil.
Since 2019, a group called Noah’s Ark Scans, [music] led by researcher Andrew Jones, has been mapping the site again.
Drones, maps, radar.
So, today there are three positions.
One says it’s the Ark, one says it’s rock, and the one in the middle says, “Show me the data.”
Their radar scans showed something they didn’t expect.
[music] straight lines, angles, and what they describe as a central corridor around 234 ft long with structures up to 20 ft deep.
Then the soil samples from inside the boat shape had more organic matter and more potassium than soil just outside it.
One early test claimed 2.7 times more carbon.
A bigger test in 2026 put [music] air at about 40%.
Why does that matter?
Because wood rots into carbon.
If a huge wooden object decayed here, the soil inside should be richer.
That is their argument.
[music] Now, let’s be fair.
Plants rot, too.
A wet hollow collects organic matter all on its own.
More carbon is a clue.
Air is not wood.
In 2023, labs at Istanbul Technical University tested around 30 rock and soil samples.
They reported clay, marine material, and signs of human activity in the region from about 5,500 to 30,000 BC.
Sea material 2,000 m up a mountain sounds huge, but old seabed sits inside mountains all over the world.
And the university’s own vice recctor said, “With this dating, it is not possible to say the ship is here.”
So in 2026 [music] they went bigger.
SA’s Jumpuriat University took the lead with archaeologist Janker Atilla in charge [music] and Andrew Jones as his deputy.
[snorts] From May to September about 20 scientists from [music] five countries worked the hill, walking radar over it line by line.
They stayed for nearly 90 days [music] and collected about 1,000 soil samples from around 150 spots.
In August, the new radar picked up features with fairly regular edges, some meeting at right angles [music] and what may be cavities under the surface.
Here’s the thing about radar, though.
It does not take photographs.
[music] It gives you echoes and people interpret them.
A straight echo can be a wall.
It can also be a crack in the rock.
[music] So, the real test is in the lab.
If they find wood, charcoal, or bone, radiocarbon dating can tell roughly when it died.
That is the result everyone is waiting for.
Every sample was tied to an exact spot on the boat shape, mapped with satellite positioning.
And then came the drill for the first time with government permission.
The team pulled continuous core samples from beneath the formation.
What came up surprised even them.
Andrew [music] Jones says the biggest finding was that the structure is entirely soil.
No solid bedrock in the holes.
Why does that matter?
Because the main natural explanation says it is a block of rock, but a soil hill can still be natural.
Joan says it himself.
[music] This could be a natural formation or it could be man-made.
Down in the cores, they found very dark, highly organic soil.
And at [music] around four to five meters down, the drill bit broke on something hard.
Nobody knows yet what it was.
They also found pottery fragments.
[music] Online, some claim they date to Noah’s time.
The truth, their age has not been established.
Next, a robot camera called Gopher is meant to look inside the cavities.
[music] So, here is where it stands.
The samples are in labs in Ankara.
The final report is expected around April or May 2027.
[music] Until then, every headline that says finally found [music] is ahead of the evidence.
So, here’s the honest answer.
Has Noah’s ark been found?
No, not yet.
Nobody has pulled a single plank of ancient wood out of that hill.
But for the first time in 60 years, someone is not just looking at the shape.
They are drilling into it.
[music] And in a few months, the lab will either find wood or it won’t.
So, which side are you on?
Ark or rock?
Tell me in the comments.
And if you want to know the moment that lab report lands, subscribe to the replay files.
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