Mount Ararat

Where is Mount Ararat?

Mount Ararat is part of the Armenian Highland.

You will find it in: Türkiye.

Summit: 39.702° N, 44.298° E

The story behind it

Ararat is really two mountains joined at the hip: Greater Ararat, the high one, and Little Ararat at 3 896 metres, linked by a long saddle. On 9 October 1829 the naturalist Friedrich Parrot reached the top with the young Armenian writer Khachatur Abovian and four companions, the first climb anybody wrote down. Parrot's barometer told him the summit was 5 250 metres high, modern maps say 5 137 metres and a few books still print 5 165, so the exact number keeps wobbling. The volcano last stirred in 1840 and has been quiet ever since. Its ice cap is melting fast, shrinking from roughly 10 square kilometres in the late 1950s to under 6 today. From Yerevan in Armenia, about 40 kilometres away, Ararat fills the whole horizon, which is why it turns up on so many Armenian paintings, coins and stamps. An old story in the Bible tells that Noah's ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat after the flood, a tale people have retold for thousands of years, although nothing of the kind has ever been found up there.

Find it on the globe

Mount Ararat is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.