Those who are convinced that the ancient Mayan Indians saw and recorded the date of our doom, December 21st 2012, believe the end will come suddenly and devastatingly.
They envision Armageddon as an abrupt and explosive end.
The Mayan calendar runs for over 5000 years and then abruptly stops on December 21st 2012.
But is there any hard scientific evidence of this impending doom? Some Geoscientists have tried to research this, looking into things such as Pole shifting, which would suggest a sudden and dramatic shift in the earths crust, leading the continents and the earths crust would slide over the planet score causing devastating consequences.
It could be so dramatic that places like Alaska could end up near the equator and vice versa leaving what currently is a hot place, covered in snow.
A pole shift would cause earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis and with the continents and countries in new locations, would affect everyone on the planet.
Ominously, evidence of pole shifting has already been found, by taking mineral cores from Norway and also from the other side of the world in Australia.
These cores when tested have in fact shown identical movements in the earth's surface.
On closer inspection however it seems that his shift previously happened over a long period of time and would not have been noticeable to any living thing on earth at the time.
Terrifying Mayan predictions about the end of the world also have their roots in ancient astronomical observations.
Mayan astrologers meticulously recorded the movement of the stars, and created a lunar calendar, allowing them to keep track of the five cycles they believed the world was divided into and also of events of the natural world.
They seemed to be able to use this calendar to predict rainy seasons, storms and hurricanes.
They also began to notice a galactic alignment; it is believed they witnessed the alignment of the sun with the centre of the Milky Way, something that happens only once every 26,000 years.
Could they have ended their calendar on the date of this next alignment or does it mean that the sun centering itself with the galaxy will trigger the energy to end the world? Receding icecaps in Peru have recently been able to provide a clue however as to what the ancient Maya may have interpreted as the end of the world.
An area once boggy and green and vegetative, become suddenly covered in ice.
Rooted wetland plants have been discovered as the ice continues to recede.
Carbon dating has revealed that these ancient plants were virtually snap frozen 5200 years ago, at the end of the last Mayan world, and the beginning of their new calendar Could this be the kind of global event that influenced Maya mythology, and can dramatic climate changes in the past say anything about the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012? Could the Mayan people really have foreseen the increase in population for instance, the burning of fossil fuels all changing the composition of the atmosphere, it is coincidence however that now, 5200 years later, we appear to be seeing a new climate change, could this climate change end up being something even more devastating then the Maya ever envisaged? The evidence of abrupt climate change more than 5000 years ago could have influenced Mayan prophecies.
Is it just coincidence that this previous change happened at the beginning of the new Mayan calendar? It seems feasible that the Mayans experienced a great climate change, and could have fed some of their prophecies for 2012, but is it also coincidence that the climate change we now appear to be experiencing appears to have been foreseen centuries ago.