Maya Chichen Itza temple pyramid

The kind of progress and scientific discoveries made by the Maya civilization is quite impressive for their time, especially considering their isolation from neighbouring civilizations.

As with many other prehistoric civilizations, the Mayans’ concept of time was cyclical. They built a series of calendars based on naturally occurring cycles observed in the sky, such as a 365-day cycle that approximated the solar year, one to record the lunation periods of the Moon, and even one to track the synodic period — the time a planet takes to assume twice the same position with respect to both the Earth and the Sun — of Venus, which the Mayans managed to measure with surprising accuracy.

All of these calendars can then be synchronized and interlinked with one another, generating further and more extensive cycles. One of such composite calendar, the so-called Mesoamerican long count calendar, forms the basis for the belief that a cataclysm will take place on December 21, 2012, a forecast that mainstream Mayanists consider a crude misinterpretation.

Maya stucco glyphs in Palenque, Mexico.

According to the Popol Vuh, an important mythological book in the Mayan culture, we are living in the ‘fourth world’. The book narrates how the gods attempted for three times to create a peaceful and harmonius world, but eventually failed. As they created the fourth world, men were placed on Earth.

All of the three previous worlds ended on a speficic date in the Mayan calendar, which coincided with the end of the cycle in the long count calendar. Each of those cycles lasted an impressive 1,872,000 days — over 5,125 years — and the fourth cycle is set to end on December 20, 2012, followed by the start of a ‘new era’ on the following day.

By following other clues within the Mayan culture and interpreting them in their own way, some researchers have come to the conclusion that a worldwide cataclysm — e.g. a pole shift — was predicted by the Maya on this date, a view that even the vast majority of experts in Mayan culture disagree with.

Sandra Noble, executive director of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., commented:

For the ancient Maya, it was a huge celebration to make it to the end of a whole cycle [...] To render December 21, 2012, as a doomsday or moment of cosmic shifting is a complete fabrication and a chance for a lot of people to cash in.

The hype has also been alimented by reports by NASA that sometime between 2010 and 2012 we will very likely experience violent solar storms:

This week researchers announced that a storm is coming—the most intense solar maximum in fifty years. The prediction comes from a team led by Mausumi Dikpati of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “The next sunspot cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the previous one,” she says. If correct, the years ahead could produce a burst of solar activity second only to the historic Solar Max of 1958.

Some believe that, if the storms reveal to be strong enough, they could under the right circumstances black out the electrical grids of a few cities and fry satellites. But as far as an apocalypse… well, let’s just say it doesn’t look that likely.