Well, I'm still here, and if you're reading this you are too, so the end of the world didn't happen at least for you and me at the end of the Maya Long Count...
Ancient Maya civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D. in Central America, had a talent for astronomy. Advanced mathematics and surprisingly sophisticated astronomy flourished, creating a very complex and interlocking calendar system, called by many the most accurate calendar in the world. They recorded time mainly using 3 interconnected calendars: the Tzolk'in (260 day count), the Haab (365 day count), and the Long Count (5126 year count). Most Maya dates were expressed as a combination of the Tzolk'in and Haab. This combination is called a Calendar Round. The Long Count appeared to end on 2012, December 21, the Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere.
In some 2012 doomsday prophecies, the Earth became a deathtrap as it underwent a "pole shift," courtesy of an asteroid impact, a rare alignment with the center of the Milky Way, and/or massive solar radiation destabilizing the inner Earth by heating it. Some folks, like a young man I met in Bralorne, BC this Fall, expected this shift of the earth's magnetic poles would cause the rotation of the earth to be reversed suddenly, causing massive tidal waves that would destroy much of the surface of the planet. Princeton University geologist Adam Maloof has extensively studied pole shifts. He says magnetic evidence in rocks confirms that continents have undergone such drastic rearrangement, but the process took millions of years--slow enough that humanity wouldn't have felt the motion.
Scholars from various other disciplines also dismissed the idea of such cataclysmic events occurring in 2012. Professional Mayanist scholars state that predictions of impending doom are not found in any of the extant classic Maya accounts, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar "ends" in 2012 misrepresents Maya history and culture. They state that the Maya have a cyclical concept of time, not one that ever focused on the end of the world. Astronomers rejected the various proposed doomsday scenarios as pseudoscience, stating that they conflict with simple astronomical observations. Many archeologists argued that the 2012 reference on a 1,300-year-old stone tablet only marks the end of a cycle in the Mayan calendar, not the end of the world.
Indigenous leaders in Mexico see the end of the Long Count as ushering in a new Mayan era, and convened a Mayan Peoples Council to focus on its cultural significance. They planned simple but profound ceremonies to mark the date, asking of participants only that they arrive early in the morning of the Solstice wearing white clothing and carrying a white candle.
The world apparently didn't end at the Solstice, so let's all rejoice and take the opportunity to celebrate the Maya people, of whom there are still many, and commit to the next 5,000 years being better than the previous 500 in the Indigenous lands of the Americas...