Will the world end on December 21, 2012? The unsettling evidence behind ancient astrologers' claim and the film they inspired



A tidal wave engulfs the Himalayas. A tsunami scoops up a warship and dumps it on the White House.

The Great Wall of China crumbles and thousands of screaming tourists plummet to their deaths.

Soon the horrors reach British shores. A massive earthquake sends Big Ben crashing to the ground and destroys the newly-built Olympic stadium, great surges in our rivers drown millions up and down the country, and plunging asteroids turn our towns and cities into smoking ruins.

Those who survive the initial onslaught flee in terror, but to run is futile for this is the ultimate catastrophe — the end of the world, as predicted by the Hollywood disaster movie 2012, which opens next month.



Domesday: Scenes from Roland Emmerich's new disaster movie, 2012

Starring John Cusack and Thandie Newton, 2012 is directed by Roland Emmerich, whose previous films, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, have conjured up similarly apocalyptic visions — with Earth invaded by hostile aliens, or threatened with the sudden onset of a new Ice Age.

While these have been dismissed as entertaining bunkum, Emmerich’s latest effort is causing rather more of a stir.

Its plot revolves around a real-life prediction that the world will end on December 21, 2012, and many doomsayers claim there is evidence to suggest that this prophecy will come true.

In America, they include Richard Heene, the Colorado father who created a worldwide frenzy when he claimed, falsely, that his six-year-old son Falcon had floated off in a home-made helium balloon shaped like a UFO.

It has since emerged that Heene planned to build an underground bunker to protect his family in the event of the sun exploding in 2012.

Whether his strange craft was part of his escape plan has yet to be established, but Heene is far from alone in his fear of this imminent Armageddon.



Far-fetched though it sounds, rumours about what might happen in 2012 are fuelling so much hysteria that NASA has had to intervene to allay public fears.

‘Two years ago, I got a question each week about 2012,’ says David Morrison, director of NASA’s Lunar Science Institute in California.

‘Now I’m getting a dozen a day and people are really worried.

‘A couple of teenagers over here have told me they were contemplating suicide rather than facing the end of the world and I’ve also had quite a few questions from England.

‘One of the saddest inquiries was from a woman who said her only friend was her cat. ‘She wanted to know if she should have him put down before 2012 so that he wouldn’t suffer.’

Morrison has posted a list of 20 questions and answers on NASA’s website to address people’s worries.

But fascination with our apparently looming annihilation continues to grow — with more than 175 books about it advertised on the Amazon website alone, and some ghoulish entrepreneurs even offering 2012 survival kits.

So, what has led to such alarm about 21/12/2012, a date causing panic not seen since fears about the Millennium computer bug in the year 2000?



Worrying prediction or hokum? Another scene from 2012

Is it all nonsense or could we really be only three years away from Doomsday?

This belief in our imminent demise is based on a calendar produced by the ancient Mayan civilisation, which flourished in the steamy rainforests of central America for nearly 2,000 years until its mysterious collapse around AD900.

Today its abandoned temples and palaces have been engulfed by the lush green vegetation of the jungle, their rooms inhabited only by wild animals and birds — yet this was once one of the sophisticated societies of its day.

Without wheels or metal tools to help them, the Mayans built many splendid stone buildings, including intricately designed observatories in which they developed a highly advanced understanding of astronomy.

Scanning the heavens for many centuries and noting any association between the movement of the celestial bodies and events on Earth, they produced complicated almanacs full of horrifying imagery.

The rising of the planet Venus in the morning, a sign believed to augur Mayan success in war, was represented by pictures of decapitated heads, while the lunar eclipses were symbolised by drawings of a dead goddess with a rope around her neck.

Eclipses were thought to be a time of great danger for women, and a period when many children would be born deaf or blind.

For all their gruesome illustrations, these almanacs were remarkably accurate in their astronomical calculations.

With neither telescopes nor other equipment at their disposal, the Mayans managed to calculate that a lunar month — the period between successive new moons — lasted 29.5305 days, just 34 seconds away from what we now know to be its actual length.

They also accurately forecast the movements of planets including Jupiter and Mars, and the occurrence of both solar and lunar eclipses for many centuries to come.

Given these very precise predictions, Doomsday theorists are alarmed that the Mayan ‘Long Count’ Calendar, as it is known, appears to end abruptly on a date they recorded as 13.0.0.0.



On the Gregorian calendar which we use today, this corresponds to December 21, 2012.

The only clue as to what the Mayans thought might happen on that day comes from an ancient stone tablet, discovered during roadworks in Mexico back in the Sixties.

Carved upon it are hieroglyphics that refer to the year 2012 and an event that will involve Bolon Yokte, the Mayan god of war and creation.

Weathering and a crack in the stone have made the last part of the inscription illegible, but Mexican archaeologists have interpreted it as saying: ‘He will descend from the sky.’

Might this be a warning of impending divine wrath?

Those who believe so include journalist Michael Drosnin, author of the best-selling book The Bible Code, which describes the work of three Israeli mathematicians who analysed the Book of Genesis using a computer.



Apocalypse: A wave of catastrophe hits the earth in the film

They supposedly discovered coded references to the names of 66 legendary rabbis who lived and died many centuries after Genesis was written.

The text was also said to contain hidden details of the rabbis’ birth and death dates, and of the towns and cities in which they would live.

Continuing this analysis, Drosnin claimed to have found encoded descriptions of the Earth being pounded by comets in the year 2012.

Others have suggested that, on the day in question, the winter solstice, the sun will be in exact alignment with the centre of our galaxy.

According to Lawrence Joseph, author of a book called Apocalypse 2012, unspecified gravitational and energy forces may be acting on us from the centre of the milky way — and, if disrupted, he speculates they would throw our bodies and our planet out of kilter, resulting in catastrophe.

He compares this to the way in which even a momentary disruption of electrical power can cause the clocks on DVD players and microwaves to blink meaninglessly. But this theory is debunked by David Morrison of NASA.

‘The galactic centre is very far away, approximately 30,000 light years, so it has negligible effects on the solar system or the Earth,’ he says.

‘In fact, the sun goes in the general direction of the galaxy’s centre every December and nothing at all happens.’

Morrison also refutes a popular internet theory that worldwide devastation will be caused by Earth’s magnetic polarity suddenly changing and throwing its direction of rotation into reverse.

‘The Earth has been rotating in the same direction for the past four billion years,’ he says. ‘The magnetic polarity does change every few hundred thousand years and the last time was about 400,000 years ago, but there is no evidence to suggest that it will happen again any time soon.

‘Even if it does, it has no bearing on the direction in which the Earth spins, and there is no reason to think it will do any other harm.’



Repetition of doom? The 2012 date is based on the sudden demise of the Mayans, whose skulls are seen above

One idea with at least some credibility is that the Earth will one day be hit by a large extra-terrestrial object. But David Morrison dismisses the idea put forward in the film that this will be a mysterious planet known as Nibiru — long the subject of speculation among the gloom-mongers of cyberspace.

Niburu was supposedly first identified by the Sumerian people, who lived 5,000 years ago in what is now southern Iraq and it is said to be heading towards Earth at an alarming rate.

Astronomers insist that there is no such planet but, much to Morrison’s frustration, this only increases suspicion that governments worldwide are concealing its existence to avoid global panic.

‘The simple laws of planetary motion tell you that if this thing really was only three years away from hitting Earth, it would be the brightest thing in the sky apart from the sun and the moon,’ he says.

‘It would have been tracked by thousands of amateur and professional astronomers all over the world. You just can’t hide a planet.’

Fictitious though planet Nibiru is, the Earth has always been subject to strikes by comets and asteroids. But to do any real damage, an object would have to be more than a mile wide. Such big hits are rare and the last was 65 million years ago, leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Searches of the cosmos for potential collisions up to 100 years into the future by NASA’s Near Earth Object Program led to them reporting that there are no serious threats in the offing and, even if a sizeable projectile did hit us, it might not wipe us out altogether.

‘There would be global firestorms and severe acid rain,’ says Don Yeomans, manager of the programme.

‘But all of these effects are relatively short-term, so the most adaptable species, like cockroaches and humans, would be likely to survive.’

According to Bill McGuire, Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London, we are 12 times more likely to experience the explosion of a super-volcano — defined as an eruption that expels 1,000 cubic kilometres or more of debris, enough to obliterate an area the size of Yorkshire.

The site that currently gives most cause for concern is Yellowstone Volcano in the American state of Wyoming, which continues to rumble ominously and could explode with the force of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs and plunge the planet into a nuclear winter.

‘There would be great clouds of sulphur gas that would mix with the water in the atmosphere to form a veil over the Earth, cutting out sunlight and dramatically cooling the Earth’s surface,’ says Professor McGuire.

‘Plants would be unable to photosynthesise and there would be widespread crop failures, famine and starvation.



‘A super-volcano probably wouldn’t kill all of us, but there would be a devastating impact on our global economy and society.’

One thing the scientists agree upon is that life on Earth will one day come to an end. The constantly diminishing supplies of hydrogen in the sun, as in all ageing stars, will cause it to swell up and become what astronomers call a ‘red giant’. It will then engulf us before collapsing in on itself and becoming a ‘white dwarf’.



Chichen-Itza, Mexico: The Mayans, who built this pyramid, prospered for 2,000 years until their ‘Long Count’ Calendar abruptly ended on the date 13.0.0.0., which in our modern system corresponds to December 21, 2012



The good news is that this is unlikely to happen for another four billion years or so. And since none of the other aforementioned fates is likely to befall us for a very long time to come, if at all, we are probably safe to get on with our Christmas plans for 2012.

We cannot be too complacent about mankind’s longevity, however.

Quite apart from the much trumpeted dangers of global warming, some experts suggest that the Earth’s magnetic field — which is crucial for deflecting solar radiation and channelling it into belts that harmlessly circle the planet — will diminish to the point where it can no longer protect us from the sun’s rays.

This could lead to an epidemic of cancers and a major disruption of the food chain.

Compasses would stop working, animals would be unable to find their way back to breeding grounds, and the weather would become less predictable.

The Earth would become unstable, unleashing a series of natural disasters.

Such a lingering end to humanity’s time on Earth might not be the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters, but it lends a chilling resonance to the final lines of TS Eliot’s famous poem The Hollow Men, penned in the aftermath of World War One.

This is the way the world ends.