A void can be a cave, a gap, or a pocket of water
A void can be a cave, a gap, or a pocket of water.
So, the team took soil samples from inside the boat’s outline and samples from outside it as a control.
According to the researchers, the soil from inside showed differences, including higher levels of organic material.
The kind of signal you might expect if something made of wood had rotted into the ground over thousands of years.
At the same time, Turkish scientists from Istanbul Technical University and ATA Ibrahim Chetchin University [music] were running their own tests in 2023.
They reported that samples collected from the site contained clay like materials and marine materials and that the results pointed to human activity in the area between roughly 5,000 500 3,000 years before Christ.
Now the researchers were careful.
That result didn’t prove [music] anything was built there.
It only placed people in this valley in the right broad era.
But combined with the radar, it was enough to push for something that had never properly been done before, a drill.
There had been one earlier attempt back in 1988, but according to the current team, those samples were ruined.
The drill had used cooling water, which mixed with the material coming up and contaminated the cores.
Whatever was down there, nobody had ever pulled it up clean.
In September 2026, that changed.
For the first time, a permitted deep core drilling survey was authorized at the dropping off site.
The official project was led by Professor Sancho Attilla of the Department of Archaeology at Seus Kumhurat University in Turkey with Andrew Jones as vice president of the research project.
A US defense scientist, Dr.
Hos Robera brought his own radar system and they chose a very specific method.
Percussion core drilling, no [music] drilling fluid, no cooling water.
The drill hammers a hollow tube straight down and pulls up a continuous column of earth exactly as it lies layer by layer.
It’s slower, it’s harder, but it doesn’t wash anything away.
And they didn’t just drill inside the shape.
They drilled outside it too, so every core from within the so-called hull could be compared against the ordinary ground next to it.
If the inside was just the same mud as the outside, this would be over.
It wasn’t.
The first shock came four [music] to 5 m down.
The drill was working through soil and sediment.
When it struck a layer so hard it broke the percussion bit.
Andrew Jones said whatever the core drill struck was harder than limestone, hard enough to break it.
The team’s working hypothesis is that it may be petrified or highly mineralized would pause on that for a second because it cuts both ways.
When would petrified the original material is slowly replaced by minerals like silica carried in by water over enormous spans of time.
The result is literally stone in the shape of wood [music] and it can be extremely hard if an enormous wooden structure [music] had been buried in wet volcanic sediment.
This is one of the things you might expect to find.
But a geologist would say something else.
That volcanic country is full of hard things.
[music] Basalt hardened lava boulders tumbled down from the mountains.
A single hard layer at 5 m.
Could be any of them.
The team knows this.
That’s why they refuse to say what it is until the lab results come back.
The drill went on in other holes.
10 m, 12, 15, and finally 18 m, almost 60 ft into the formation.
The cores that came up showed sequences of soil and sediment, then intervals of dark organic rich material, and then something no one wanted to see, and everyone wanted to see, empty space, multiple cavities.
The drill would push through material and then suddenly drop as if it had broken into a hollow one.
Cavity was continuously filled with mud and water.
As the team worked, it kept holding water as if it was enclosed and through all of it.
One more detail that the team says matters most in the holes drilled inside the formation.
They never hit bedrock.
No solid limestone floor.
The skeptics’s explanation says this shape [music] is a fold of hard rock with mud piled around it.
So where the team asks is the rock over the whole campaign.
They report collecting nearly a thousand soil samples [music] and according to reports of the early measurements the carbon levels inside the formation came back roughly 40% higher than outside it.
Carbon is the building block of [music] everything that was once alive.
Wood plants, animals, 40% more of it inside a boat-shaped outline than in the ground it is exactly the kind of number that makes believers lean forward.
But it’s also the kind of number a skeptic has an answer for.
Organic material collects naturally in hollows and basins, a depression on a hillside, traps plants, soil, and water, and it rots there for thousands of years.
A trough, in other words, would be richer in carbon for the same reason.
The bottom of a pond is the number is real.
What it means is the fight and the team isn’t done.
They’ve built a machine for the next step.
It is a small robot with a highresolution camera designed to slide down narrow bore holes [music] and into the cavities the drill has found.
The idea is to explore the mapped voids, tunnels, and corridors without ripping open the whole hillside with trenches.
They named it Gopher.
If you know your Bible, you know why.
Genesis 6:14.
Make the an arc of go forward.
Nobody today knows for sure what gopher wood was.
It appears in that one verse and nowhere else.
Some translators think it was Cyprus.
Some think it was a lost word for [music] timber coated in pitch.
The robot is named after one of the great unsolved words of the ancient world.
Now, you might expect every believer on earth to be celebrating.
They aren’t.
One of the sharpest criticisms of the drilling came from Ken Ham, the founder of Answers in Genesis, one of the most famous biblical literalist organizations in the world, the same group that built a full-size replica of the Ark in Kentucky.
Ham said the team appeared convinced of what the site likely was before the data had even been analyzed.
Many creationist researchers have long argued that the drop in our site can’t be the ark at all.
A wooden vessel, they say, would not survive 4 or 5,000 years sitting in a mud flow on an earthquake [music] prone slope.
Others believe the true resting place is far higher, locked under the ice cap of Mount Ararat itself.
The region’s earthquakes are no small detail.
In 1840, a massive earthquake struck the slopes of Mount Ararat.
It triggered a catastrophic landslide that buried the village of Aari and destroyed the ancient monastery [music] of St.
Jacob, a place where, according to local tradition, monks had kept relics said to come from the ark.
Everything was swept away in minutes.
This is a landscape that moves, breaks, and buries.
And mainstream geologists point out that none of this has been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet.
So far, the results exist in press statements and field reports.
The team itself agrees on this point.
Andrew Jones has said openly that they have not identified any material as ancient wood and they have not established its age, which leaves us exactly where the drill left us, standing over a hole in a boat-shaped hill holding a broken bit.
So, let’s lay out honestly what’s in those refrigerated boxes right now.
Continuous cores, some as deep as 18 m, pulled up without water, contaminating them.
Hundreds of samples from inside the ship and hundreds from outside it.
A hard layer that broke steel.
Organic rich bands, cavities, including one that holds water and no bedrock [music] where the geological explanation says it should be over this winter.
Those samples go to laboratories for organic content measurements, mineral analysis, and microscopy.
[music] The team says that under a microscope, petrified wood can often still show the ghost of its original cell structure, the rings and fibers of the tree it once was.
Stone [music] that’s just stone won’t have that.
If the hard layer turns out to be bassalt or ordinary limestone or a volcanic boulder, the story of dropping the probably closes for good.
60 years of arguing ended by a thin slice of rock under a lens.
But if it shows cell structure, if it’s wood, if it’s in the shape of something built, and if it’s old enough, then the question stops being about a legend.
Think about what that would mean.
A vessel of that size far from any sea at almost 2,000 m in the exact region.
The oldest texts point to every flood story from Mesopotamia to Genesis would suddenly have a physical address.
The team [music] says an initial report could come in winter.
A fuller scientific statement in spring of 2027 and a second field season after that with the gopher robot lowered into the cavities for the first time.
Until then, nobody can honestly tell you what the drill hit.
Not the believers, not the skeptics, not the [music] men who were standing on the rig when the bit broke.
What we can tell you is this.
For 60 years, people have looked at this hillside from above and argued about its shape.
In September 2026, for the first time, someone reached inside it and the hill pushed back.
The answer is now in a box in a cold room waiting for a microscope.
When those results come out, we’ll be here.
So, if you want to know what the drill really hit, make sure you’re subscribed and tell us in the comments.
Do you think it’s the ark or a trick of the mountain?
