'Mayan' 2012 prophecy — end of the b'ak'tun

That the end of a Maya Long Count b'ak'tun on 21 December 2012 would trigger a cosmic event ending the world.

The 2012 phenomenon claimed that a Maya Long Count cycle ending on 21 December 2012 marked the end of the world. Working Maya scholars and NASA repeatedly rebutted the framing; the day passed uneventfully.

New Age and pop-culture reinterpretations — rumor / popular framing.

Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009) and a genre of trade paperbacks turned an obscure New Age idea into a global talking point. NASA received enough inbound questions that it published dedicated FAQ pages ahead of the date.

WHY IT RESONATEDThe 2009 film 2012, dozens of trade books, and a wave of documentary programming amplified an idea that Maya scholars themselves consistently rejected.

21 December 2012 passed without incident. Maya communities in Guatemala and Mexico marked the calendar turnover as a cultural event, not a doomsday. Academic and NASA post-mortems described the phenomenon as a case study in how popular media laundered pseudoscience.

The 'prediction' had no basis in actual Maya calendrics — cycles roll over the way an odometer does — and every specific astronomical claim attached to it (Nibiru, galactic alignment, polar shift) was refuted by professional astronomers in advance.

• NASA — Beyond 2012: Why the world didn't endScientific institution
• The 2012 phenomenon — Maya calendrics and the media cycle (overview, with sourced citations)Reference work

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Browse every dated entry on record — end of the world predictions by year, from historical failed apocalypses to upcoming doomsday dates.