It is interesting that every ancient culture had a global deluge story, myth, belief. Even land locked desert cultures and those high in the mountains had stories about a world wide flood.
Many ancient cultures favored being near water, where floods were an occasional hazard. Those in high mountains were often living on land that was once underwater. Imagine an ancient Himalayan finding fossilized fish in the mountain rock. Would he then assume that those mountains were upthrust from the ocean floor by tectonic plate movements that resulted in the Indian subcontinent slamming into Asia, or would he assume that an angry deity must have flooded the place?
The Durupinar site is a mud flow around a rock formation. There are others in the area, it just so happens this one looks a bit boat-shaped and roughly the dimensions of the Ark. Here's an aerial of one that's a little bigger, supposedly in Oregon though I've never confirmed that:
The Durupinar site has been geologically investigated in the past, and was the subject of past vigorous debates right here on these forums. The feature was first noticed by a Turkish pilot in the 1950s and largely ignored until pretend-archaeologist Ron Wyatt decided it had to be the Ark. Wyatt (who also found the Ark of the Covenant and the Red Sea crossing... it's all on his web site so it must be true!) traveled to the site and, armed with a long-range locator, mapped out the ribs of the boat. The LRL that he used was called an Omnitron, and the guy who made those was Dell Winders who was once a mainstay of this very forum.
The problem is, the Omnitron LRL was just a pair of dowsing rods and had no ability to detect anything at all, other than gravity. Now, this is the Dowsing forum and as such there are a lot of dowsing believers here, so I don't expect to convince anyone that dowsing doesn't actually work. But Wyatt then got a real geophysicist, Dr. John Baumgardner of Los Alamos Nat'l Lab, to go over and do some real geologic testing. Baumgardner's tests completely refuted everything Wyatt was claiming, and there was absolutely no correlation between the results of the LRL and Baumgardner's tests. Here's the funny part: Baumgardner is a young-Earth creationist who believes the flood story is literally true. He had every reason to want to accept Wyatt's claims, but instead accepted what his scientific instruments told him. During those past forum debates, I once called Baumgardner on the phone and talked to him about his results. He had no doubt whatsoever that the Durupinar site was merely a natural formation.
Turkish scientists likewise investigated the site and came to the same conclusion: natural. However, the Turkish government built a visitor's center overlooking the site. So I emailed someone about this (25 years ago so I don't remember who) and I was told that this region of Turkey is fairly impoverished, so the visitor's center was built to attract evangelical Christians who wanted to gaze upon the Ark's final resting place. Apparently it's been successful.
Now someone else wants to investigate. I suppose that, like the Oak Island money pit, as long as there continues to be anyone believing this is Noah's Ark there will continue to be investigations, whether pretend or real. That's fine, it's how science works. In the end, I'm certain it will continue to be a geologic oddity and not a mythical boat.
