This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A team of researchers from Sivas Cumhuriyet University in Turkey is investigating a long-standing claim: that a boat-shaped geological formation in the country's east contains the remains of Noah's Ark. In the biblical Book of Genesis, God decides to destroy the world with a flood.
Following God's instructions, Noah builds an ark—a large wooden vessel—to save himself, his family and animals of every kind. The formation in question, known as Durupınar, has been associated with Noah's Ark for nearly 70 years. This new research team has attracted social media attention through a partnership with a separate U.S.-based Christian organization called Noah's Ark Scans.
This group has promoted the Durupınar site as the resting place of Noah's Ark since at least 2021. Durupınar is a natural geological formation composed of sedimentary material rich in iron oxides. It is located near the town of Doğubayazıt, just a few miles from the Iranian border.
Official statements from researchers involved in this project say that laboratory analysis is still underway. Researchers have nevertheless described some preliminary findings as potentially consistent with a shiplike structure, while claims circulating on social media have been more definitive, saying that scans have confirmed the formation is man-made and "100% not geological." Claims that the formation is man-made have also appeared in British and American media coverage. As a scholar of early Christianity, I study biblical texts and their interpretation.
Certain claims about the Durupınar formation have been circulating for decades, and they offer an opportunity to examine how people read and interpret the biblical flood story. To understand the current claims, it helps to ask how this formation came to be associated with Noah's Ark in the first place. The Durupınar formation takes its name from Turkish army captain İlhan Durupınar, who noticed the formation's boatlike shape while examining aerial photographs of the region in 1959.
Because of its proximity to a peak known since the Middle Ages as Mount Ararat, which the Genesis flood account claims is the place where Noah's Ark came to rest, Durupınar wondered whether this formation might be the petrified remains of the ark, preserved in the landscape over time. The following year, Durupınar joined a team sponsored by the Archaeological Research Foundation in the United States on an expedition to the site. Led by George Vandeman, a television evangelist, and Arthur Brandenberger, a specialist who used aerial photographs to measure and map the landscape, the team traveled to the site with the explicit goal of confirming whether it was, in fact, the petrified remains of the fabled Ark of Noah.
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