The Jerusalem Post visited the Durupinar formation last week, the boat-shaped mound in eastern Turkey that is possibly the resting place of Noah’s Ark, to see what a first round of drilling conducted by Noah’s Ark Scans (NAS) has turned up.
The Post’s visit came after the close of NAS’s most recent season of fieldwork at the site, during the week of Parashat Noah, when Jews around the world read the story of the Flood and the Ark.
But the story of the Ark does not belong exclusively to the Jewish people: It appears in the Torah, the New Testament, and the Quran, and the composition of the team working at the site reflects this.
For Adv. Ohav Cohen, that is the point: “At a time when nations and religions seem more divided than ever, this project brings together Jews, Christians, Muslims, and researchers from across the world in pursuit of a shared history,” he said.
Cohen, an Israeli lawyer and researcher working with NAS, told the Post. “Whatever we ultimately discover, there is something profoundly meaningful about people of different faiths working side by side, united by a story that belongs to all of humanity.”
“After all, if we are all descendants of Noah, then we really are all in the same boat,” he quipped.
NAS, led by Andrew Jones, documents the ongoing work at Durupinar. In May 2026, the Turkish government approved the group’s request to begin invasive study of the site, a major milestone after decades of surface-level analysis.
Working under Prof. Cenker Atila of Sivas Cumhuriyet University’s Archaeology Department, the team began core drilling in July. When the season ended in September, samples taken from within the formation were sent to several universities, including Bar-Ilan University, for testing, with a final report expected next spring.
The man who kept coming back
For Jones, the fascination with Durupinar goes back more than 30 years. Raised in a Christian home and drawn to “anything Bible-related,” he first heard about the formation in middle school.
Sitting on the sidelines of the 8th International Symposium on Mount Ararat and Noah’s Ark at Agri Ibrahim Cecen University, Jones told the Post that his interest in the site quickly grew beyond idle fascination, leading him to reach out to explorers who had studied it, such as Ron Wyatt and David Fasold.
Jones’ first visit to Durupinar was in 1997, following a trip to Turkey with a friend while in college. “It felt abandoned. There were no trees around it at that time,” he said. “It was this very lonely boat shape on the side of the mountain.”
The visitor’s center, built in 1987, was a bare cinder-block building run by a chain-smoking Kurdish caretaker who “offered us chai and no information about Noah’s Ark, nothing,” Jones noted.
He subsequently visited the site on three additional occasions between 1997 and 2000.
After a break of 13 years, Jones returned in 2013 with a tour group and reconnected with the Kurdish guides he had met on earlier trips. They asked whether he wanted to pursue something scientific, since little was happening at the site.
“Some tourists were going there; but again, it was kind of like it was in 1997. No one cared about it,” he said.
He returned to Turkey twice in 2014. On his second trip, ERT scans conducted at the site produced “really good results.”
“That got us all excited, since the last time anything was done on the ship [was in] the late 1980s,” Jones said. “That was kind of the start of the current effort because that got everyone excited.”
Further scans in 2019, utilizing ground-penetrating radar (GPR), LiDAR data collection, and thermal cameras, win conjunction with the Science Channel, showed what Jones described as an unnatural pattern of anomalies. The COVID pandemic closed borders in 2020. Following the death of his parents, Jones decided to move to Turkey to be closer to the site and learn the bureaucracy involved in excavating it.
In 2022, NAS renovated the site’s visitor center. Today, it is paneled with wood flooring and large-scale posters showing the results of the 2014 and 2019 scans covering the walls. A 3D scale model of Durupinar built using GPR data taken from the site sits in the center of the space.
During the visit, the Post was shown several marine fossils that had been previously found at and around Durupinar.
In 2024, soil scientist William Crabtree tested 88 soil samples taken from both within and outside of the site. He found that soil from inside the formation had more organic matter, more potassium, and a pH about one unit lower than soil from the outside.
But without a Turkish university partner, NAS could do nothing more than surface-level testing until Atila, a classical archaeologist from Turkey’s Sivas University, connected with Jones online.
On behalf of NAS, Atila appealed to the Turkish Environment, Urbanization and Climate Change Ministry for permission to conduct an invasive study of the Durupinar formation, providing a detailed, multi-step outline of the planned testing.
“We had core drilling to 75 meters down, everything geophysical I could think of,” Jones said. “All these are very expensive things to do. But I just threw it all in and said, ‘Let’s see what they approve.’”
According to Jones, the only question the ministry asked was regarding the requested depth of the core drilling. The 75-meter mark, he explained, was due to the estimate that bedrock rested at 70 meters below the surface.
“We wanted to core the deepest we’re allowed to,” Jones said. “To see what we can see all the way down.”
The ministry approved the plan two weeks later, Atila told the Post, with no changes made to any of the requests and plans.
What the drills found
The partnership between Atila and Jones produced results that the team says are worth pursuing, though no one is claiming to have found proof.
During the recent season, the team drilled 12 holes inside the formation and four outside it, going as deep as some 20 meters in places. By Jones’s account, none struck bedrock, which he said would have been the sign of a natural rock formation.
“We didn’t hit any solid rock layer across the site,” he said, adding: “I think that it’s in our favor.”
Notably, Jones mentioned, the drill bit had broken after hitting an unidentified object. Before breaking, the bit had been “through rock pretty fine… if we hit a boulder or something, we go right through it, back into the soil.”
Jones affirmed that NAS would be able to drill a slightly wider hole during its next season, in order to retrieve the broken bit.
To critics claiming that the drilling hadn’t gone deep enough, Jones replied that the team is expected to continue drilling during its next season, in the summer of 2027.
Alongside core drilling and collecting soil samples, the NAS team conducted new radar scans using BakhtarRadar, a subsurface imaging system developed by engineer Khosrow Bakhtar, chief scientist at Bakhtar Research and Engineering LLC.
Preliminary findings from the scans appear to show linear features, angular intersections, layered structures, and possible voids beneath the formation. Researchers interpret these features as possible corridors, compartments, and multiple internal levels similar to the biblical description of the ark.
The radar team had come from the United States, Atila said, but due to heavy rain and other constraints, had only seven days to work on the site. He noted that the team is expected to return in 2027.
Regarding the voids beneath the formation, Atila was careful not to overstate the results.
“I don’t want to say absolutely,” he said. “It’s a corridor. Maybe it can be a geological hole.”
He explained that he is planning future fieldwork at the site, attempting to understand whether the “hole” belongs to the Ark or to a geological formation.
Pieces of what may be petrified wood were also found at the site and sent to Sivas for carbon dating and identification, Atila added. The team is now awaiting the soil analysis, final radar, and carbon-dating results.
Cohen said: “As a lawyer, I have spent years examining evidence and understanding the importance of the bigger picture. In a courtroom, no single piece of circumstantial evidence necessarily proves a case, but the cumulative weight of independent findings can become extraordinarily compelling.
“That is precisely what fascinates me about this site. If this is not Noah’s Ark, we may be looking at one of the most remarkable coincidences in history. At some point, the sheer number of converging clues demands an explanation.”
But not everyone has welcomed the work being conducted at Durupinar.
Jones told the Post that not long after beginning fieldwork at the site in July, the local governor halted the dig for nearly a week after both the governor’s office and the Turkish Culture and Tourism Ministry received numerous phone calls questioning the work being done.
According to Jones, the callers questioned officials over why foreigners such as NAS were allowed to work so close to the Turkish-Iranian border and warned that they might do something illegal or damaging to the site.
The pause was lifted after the governor consulted with individuals familiar with the work happening on the ground, and the team was able to carry on under their original permit.
Jones recalled Atila telling him, at the time, that he’d never seen anything like it.
“This is the first time I’ve seen people so interested in the work that they want to stop us,” Jones recalled him saying. “They all become archaeologists suddenly.”
Jones said he could only guess at the motives behind the complaints, among them jealousy from other teams searching for Noah’s Ark in other locations or a Turkish dislike of foreigners working in the area.
Scientific objections to the claim of Durupinar being the resting place of the Ark, however, are less personal and focus more on the geological appearance of the site.
Such theories include the idea that its ship-like shape was formed by mud flowing around an upright piece of bedrock, that a solid limestone boulder originating near the Iranian border was over the years shaped by glaciers and weathering, and that the formation is actually a syncline (folded rocks).
All three theories, Jones noted, depend on having solid rock underneath, of which the team’s drilling found no evidence.
“We’re not forcing the results,” Jones said. “If we core drilled and hit a rock layer across the whole site, yeah, we’d be like, okay, it’s most likely natural. But we didn’t.”
Paperwork for a second season of work has already been submitted, Jones said.
While the initial permit presented by Atila and approved by the Turkish government covered far more than the team is currently able to undertake, there are several methods Jones wants to seek additional approval for, such as seismic imaging, magnetometry and microgravity, and possibly muon imaging, a technique used at the pyramids of Egypt to detect voids.
At the end of the two-year process, the team will decide on how to proceed based on the sufficiency of the data collected, Jones explained.
Digging would be the last stage of excavations, should analysis results come back positive and NAS is able to get it approved. If Durupinar is the Ark, Jones said, it would be the oldest man-made object documented by biblical chronology, making it extremely fragile, and any highly invasive work will have to be done carefully.
For Cohen, though, the case for pressing on goes beyond curiosity.
“I believe we have a moral, historical, and perhaps even spiritual obligation to investigate this site as thoroughly as possible,” he told the Post.
“We are potentially standing before something that could fundamentally change our understanding of human history.
“With every new clue, every radar scan, and every sample examined, the responsibility to pursue the truth only grows stronger. Whether this ultimately proves to be Noah’s Ark or not, walking away without exhausting every scientific possibility would be a disservice to future generations.”
For Jones and Crabtree, the discovery could mark a significant point of unification worldwide.
“If we can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is Noah’s Ark, the whole world will feel it in their heart, whether they’re an atheist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Jew,” Crabtree told the Post.
Jones added, “We live in a world that’s divided, but the story itself can provide that type of unity to people, and hopefully those who want it can see it in the story, and in the site itself here.”