Researchers finished their first full field season at Turkey’s boat-shaped Durupınar formation, drilling over 60 feet deep for soil that may hold clues to Noah’s Ark.
The Noah’s Ark Research Project has wrapped its first full season of fieldwork near Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, pushing deeper than ever into the famous Durupınar site. For the first time, the team used deep-core drilling and reached depths of 20 meters, more than 60 feet, in some spots.
Crews pulled more than 300 soil samples from varying depths inside and outside the formation. Those samples are headed for laboratory analysis this winter, aimed at spotting signs of man-made activity or material consistent with decayed wood. Project vice president Andrew Jones described the work to Fox News Digital.
The boat-shaped ridge has drawn attention since it was first identified in 1959. Believers have long wondered whether it could hold remains tied to the biblical flood account. Critics have called it a natural landform. This season’s drilling gives both sides fresh material to weigh.
Last year’s sampling set the stage. Researchers compared soil from inside the formation with soil taken outside it and reported clear contrasts. Organic matter ran three times higher inside the site. Potassium levels ran 38% higher inside as well, with pH differences too.
Jones said those results drove the decision to go farther down.
“Near [the] surface, we’re seeing a difference in the soil. Let’s go deeper this year and see what we can find,” Jones said.
Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University has backed the project as the team kept collecting samples over the past year. The latest season marked the first time crews punched cores deep into the formation itself rather than working only near the surface.
One early field observation already challenges a common skeptical line. When the team drilled into the formation this year, it did not strike a solid mass of limestone or other rock.
“When we drilled into the formation this year for the first time, we did not encounter any solid block of rock, of limestone, or of any type of a rock. We were hitting mainly soil,” Jones said.
He was careful not to oversell the finding. Lab work still comes first. Yet he argued the soil result should slow claims that the entire feature is simply solid rock.
“We’re still studying our results, but we believe that this should give skeptics pause when they say this is a rock formation,” Jones said. “We still have the lab work to do.”
Hundreds of samples are now in that pipeline. The winter tests will look for evidence of human activity or decayed wood, the kind of material that could point to a man-made structure rather than a pure geological oddity.
"That's what we'll be testing this winter. Just to see if we can find any type of man-made activity or something that suggests decayed wood."
Jones made plain that conclusions wait on those results.
Finds near the site add another layer. Ancient pottery turned up beside the formation, not inside it, Jones stressed. Style dating places the pieces from the early Chalcolithic, or Copper Age, through the Iron Age.
Two ancient settlements also lie nearby. One of them has not been excavated. Jones tied that setting to the larger question without claiming proof.
“You can connect the dots. If this is Noah’s Ark, we have people living right beside it early on,” he said.
That is a hypothesis, not a verdict. The project has urged the public not to leap ahead of the lab data. Jones, who identified himself as a Christian, said he understands the mockery the search can draw.
“I can understand because I have friends who are atheists or agnostic, and they think that I’m looking for Santa’s house or something,” he said. “We still have the lab work to do. And I hope everyone can follow along and see what we find.”
Scientific pushback is not new. In 1996, geologists Lorence Gene Collins and David Franklin Fasold published a paper rejecting claims that the formation was Noah’s Ark. They concluded it was “a natural rock structure.”
That judgment has shaped much of the conventional view ever since. The new cores and the pending soil chemistry tests put fresh measurements against an old conclusion. Whether the lab work supports man-made traces, organic decay consistent with wood, or nothing of the kind remains an open question until the analysis is done.
What is no longer open is the depth of the probe. Surface arguments and short cores have given way to samples from more than 60 feet down, taken both inside and outside the outline of the formation. The team finished the field season. The instruments and chemists get the next turn.
Serious questions about history deserve dirt under the fingernails and lab benches, not eye-rolls from people who decided the case was closed in 1996.
