Lauren Witzke had a bold prediction as drilling began at a boat-shaped formation in eastern Turkey last month.
“When we are done, university curriculums will need to be re-written, and Darwinism will be dismantled,” she wrote from the site. “This is the place where creation began anew.”
Witzke is the marketing and fundraising director for Noah’s Ark Scans, an organization helping investigate the Durupınar formation near Mount Ararat. She had just announced that researchers had begun drilling beneath the formation, looking for physical evidence that it could be the remains of the vessel described in Genesis.
Finding Noah’s Ark would certainly qualify as an extraordinary archaeological discovery.
But dismantling the theory of evolution?
Drilling Into “Noah’s Ark”
From above, Durupınar certainly looks the part.
The 515-foot formation was identified in aerial photographs by Turkish Army Captain İlhan Durupınar in 1959. Its long, pointed outline resembles a ship, and its length has been compared with the 300-cubit Ark described in Genesis.
That resemblance has attracted Ark hunters for decades, and now it is receiving its most extensive scientific examination yet.
Sivas Cumhuriyet University archaeologist Cenker Atila is directing an officially authorized project involving researchers from five countries. Between June and September, the team mapped the formation, used LiDAR and ground-penetrating radar to examine what lies beneath it, and (using a robotic drill) extracted 366 core samples from depths of about 3 to 49 feet. Those samples have been sent to a university laboratory for analysis, including tests for organic material and age. Full evaluation of the project is expected to continue into 2027.
Earlier radar surveys have produced what Noah’s Ark Scans describes as linear structures, right angles, and corridor-like features beneath the surface. Soil inside the formation has also shown substantially more organic material than soil outside it. The group's researchers want to know whether those anomalies have a natural geological explanation or could point to something constructed by humans.
What Does Noah Have to Do With Darwin?
At first glance, Noah’s Ark and Charles Darwin seem to belong in completely different conversations.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection concerns how populations of living organisms change over generations.
Noah’s Ark is a boat.
One might think that finding a boat wouldn't obviously tell us anything about DNA, common ancestry, or natural selection, but passionate Ark hunters have grand plans.
To understand Witzke’s claim, you have to look at the much larger role Noah’s Flood plays within Young-Earth Creationism.
Young-earth creationists generally interpret the opening chapters of Genesis as straightforward history. They believe God created the world relatively recently, that humans and all major forms of animal life were created separately, and that Noah survived a literal worldwide flood a little more than 4,000 years ago.
Under that interpretation, the Flood did considerably more than float the Ark. It reshaped the planet.
Answers in Genesis, perhaps the best-known young-earth creationist ministry, argues that much of the planet’s sedimentary rock and fossil record was produced rapidly during Noah’s Flood rather than accumulating across hundreds of millions of years. Fossil graveyards, layers of sediment and the ordering of fossils are interpreted through the catastrophe described in Genesis.
This approach is generally called “flood geology.”
Answers in Genesis currently dates the Flood to approximately 2348 B.C. It argues that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs once shared the planet. Dinosaurs that survived the Flood did so aboard the Ark, creationists say, probably as younger and smaller animals rather than full-grown adults.
As for squeezing the rest of the animal kingdom inside, creationists argue that Noah didn't have to collect every species. Instead, they say he carried representatives of about 1,400 biblical “kinds,” roughly comparable to biological families, allowing lions, tigers and other cats to descend from one original cat "kind" after the Flood. Its researchers estimate that overall there may have been fewer than 6,700 individual animals aboard.
Even the extinction of the dinosaurs fits into this timeline. The Institute for Creation Research argues that dinosaurs came off the Ark, spread across the post-Flood world, lived among human beings, and eventually just died out. Some creationists have suggested that ancient stories about dragons preserve memories of those encounters.
It also explains why an Ark discovery could carry such enormous significance to some believers. If the Ark were found, they could see it not simply as an ancient ship, but as physical evidence for Noah, the Flood, a young Earth, and a biblical chronology that conflicts directly with modern geology and evolutionary history.
A Million-Dollar Search
People have been putting serious money behind that hope for a long time.
In 1982, former Apollo 15 astronaut James Irwin led an expedition to Mount Ararat financed by about $50,000 in private donations. Irwin had walked on the moon eleven years earlier and later founded an evangelical ministry. His Ark expedition ended without a discovery and with Irwin badly injured after a fall on the mountain.
He went back to look again. And not just once... he went back five more times.
By 1986, The Washington Post was reporting on Irwin’s planned sixth expedition. A heart attack two months earlier had not dissuaded him, even though his doctor had told him not to climb above 10,000 feet.
Irwin was far from alone. In 1983, the Institute for Creation Research reported that competing Ark expeditions had spent “well over a quarter of a million dollars” in a single summer, enough money that the organization considered abandoning expensive expeditions and simply offering a cash reward to anyone in Turkey who could produce the Ark.
The budgets kept growing. In 2004, Honolulu businessman Daniel McGivern announced plans to spend $900,000 on another expedition to Mount Ararat after satellite images appeared to show a suspicious object beneath the ice.
The current effort is not cheap either.
Noah’s Ark Scans says the 2026 season of radar surveys, drilling and laboratory analysis will ultimately cost well north of $1 million. Its current crowdfunding campaign has a $600,000 goal and had raised more than $121,000 as of this week. Donations help pay for geophysical equipment, drilling, travel, laboratory work and upgrades to a visitor center at the site. The organization also sells merchandise and offers tours.
After more than a century of reported sightings, expeditions, satellite photographs, soil tests and searches for it and other biblical relics, the Ark remains capable of opening wallets.
Noah's Ark, Inc.
Few people have done more to prove the Ark than Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis. Ham also created Kentucky’s Ark Encounter, a ticketed attraction built around a 510-foot reconstruction of Noah’s Ark, as well as the nearby Creation Museum. Together, the attractions draw more than 1.5 million visitors a year, according to Answers in Genesis, which says attractions, educational materials and other earned revenue now account for roughly 80% of the ministry’s operating budget.
In other words, Noah’s Ark is not just theology for Ham: it's the center of an empire.
Ham put his theological position particularly starkly this year: “Noah’s flood was a global flood,” he wrote in April. “That means the water totally covered the entire globe.” To Ham, accepting millions of years of geological history requires Christians to reinterpret a Flood that Scripture presents as global.
But that interpretation is far from universal among Christians.
The Catholic Church, for example, does not see biological evolution or the Big Bang as incompatible with belief in God. Addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 2014, Pope Francis said that “evolution in nature does not conflict with the notion of Creation” and likewise rejected the idea that the Big Bang excludes a divine creator.
Christians can therefore agree that God created the universe while disagreeing profoundly about what Genesis is intended to tell us about geology and biology.
Creationists Aren’t Buying It Either
There is another problem with framing Durupınar as a coming showdown between believers and evolutionists.
Some of the site's most pointed critics are creationists themselves.
Just this week, the Institute for Creation Research weighed in on the new drilling and said there are “compelling reasons to cross it off the list of possible ark sites.” Its objections include the pointed, ship-like shape itself. ICR argues that the Hebrew word used in Genesis describes something closer to a box, not a vessel with pointed ends. Creationist researcher Don Patton, who says he has personally examined Durupınar repeatedly, calls it a “natural feldspar formation.”
Andrew Snelling is a geologist with Answers in Genesis. He believes Noah was real, the Ark was real, and the Flood covered the entire Earth. He would very much like archaeological confirmation of the biblical vessel.
He does not think they'll find it at Durupınar.
Snelling has argued for decades that the boat-shaped Turkish formation can be explained by ordinary geology. He says the radar anomalies promoted as possible decks, rooms, and corridors could instead reflect natural features in the rock, while differences in soil and organic content may have natural explanations as well.
More pointedly, he has accused Ark advocates of allowing their expectations to shape how they read the scans.
A peer-reviewed geological study reached a similar conclusion almost 30 years ago. Geologist Lorence Collins and David Fasold, who had previously promoted Durupınar as the Ark, examined alleged petrified wood, metal fittings, walls, and anchor stones. Their 1996 paper concluded that the formation was natural and that the supposed artifacts could be explained by local rocks and minerals.
Answers in Genesis still believes a worldwide Flood occurred. It simply argues that Christians should not use questionable evidence to prove it.
“When Christians use poor, easily disproven, or inconclusive evidence for the truth of God’s Word,” Ken Ham wrote last year, “it makes it easier for skeptics to dismiss everything that person has to say.”
What If It Isn’t the Ark?
There is one outcome the Durupınar drilling cannot produce: ending the search for Noah’s Ark.
Even many creationists who reject this site still believe the vessel exists. They can cross Durupınar off the list without crossing off Noah. Other Ark hunters have long argued that eyewitness reports point instead to a preserved wooden vessel much higher on Mount Ararat.
It is a pattern almost as old as the modern Ark hunt.
When James Irwin returned from his $50,000 expedition in 1982, he was candid about the results.
“We found no wood and we found no ark,” he said.
Then came the next sentence: “I’m not saying the ark is not there. It probably is.”
Irwin would spend the rest of his life going back.
Forty-four years later, researchers have radar, robotic drills, laboratory testing and a seven-figure research budget. The ship-shaped hill is still there. So is the conviction that somewhere in the mountains of eastern Turkey, physical proof of Genesis may still be waiting.
If the Ark is always somewhere else, what would it take to stop looking?
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