New Findings Extend Mayan Calendar

Mayan numbers on the wall stretch 7,000 years into the future.

The recent discovery of an underground Mayan workshop in the dense Guatemalan jungle is important for two reasons: one, the murals and other wall painting are all surprisingly well preserved; and two, calendar fragments show that the Mayan calendar does not end this year.

According to NPR:

Writing in the journal Science, the scientists say the murals confirm what Mayan archaeologists have been saying for years: The Mayan calendar does not predict the end of time in 2012, as some New Age prophets have argued. In fact, the murals register future time stretching far beyond 2012. 

Archaeologist William Saturno from Boston University compares Mayan calendars to a car's odometer. "If we're driving a car," Satruno says, "we don't anticipate that at 100,000 miles the car will vanish from beneath us. We know that it will reset to zero, and the next 10th of a mile we go we'll have another number to look at." 

What these Mayan timekeepers were doing was simply marking the passage of time from past to future, but in discrete intervals.

The buried room apparently was a workshop used by scribes or astronomers working for a Mayan king. The paintings depict the king and members of his court. The numbers mark important periods in the Mayan calendar.

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What's the Light from El Castillo?

Is it an image of the cosmic power of a Mayan temple? Is it a Photoshop image designed to fool gullible viewers? Or is it a glitch in Hector Siliezar’s iPhone? Nobody is really certain.

Siliezar took the photo in 2009 in a series of three photos as he attempted to catch a lightning strike above the El Castillo pyramid in Chichen Itza. A thunderstorm was overhead and lightning was beginning to flash.

His first two photos show nothing out of the ordinary. When he took the third photo, the vertical beam of light from the pyramid’s apex was undetected by the naked eye. Everyone he immediately showed the photo was amazed. Of course the photo now is making the rounds of Mayan calendar sites.

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New Data Contradicts Mayan Calendar End Date

The Mayan Long Count calendar likely doesn’t end on December 21, 2012  ~ the date hyped by many apocalyptic thinkers ~ according to new research into the technique for translating the ancient calendar into Gregorian calendar years.

The research also contends that the actual end date of the Mayan calendar is essentially unknown within at least a 100-year span. In fact, the Mayan calendar may have already ended.

According to LiveScience:

A new critique, published as a chapter in the new textbook Calendars and Years II: Astronomy and Time in the Ancient and Medieval World (Oxbow Books, 2010), argues that the accepted conversions of dates from Mayan to the modern calendar may be off by as much as 50 or 100 years. That would throw the supposed and overhyped 2012 apocalypse off by decades and cast into doubt the dates of historical Mayan events. (The doomsday worries are based on the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, much as our year ends on Dec. 31.) 

The Mayan calendar was converted to today's Gregorian calendar using a calculation called the GMT constant, named for the last initials of three early Mayanist researchers. Much of the work emphasized dates recovered from colonial documents that were written in the Mayan language in the Latin alphabet, according to the chapter's author, Gerardo Aldana, professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California.

Later, the GMT constant was bolstered by American linguist and anthropologist Floyd Lounsbury, who used data in the Dresden Codex Venus Table, a Mayan calendar and almanac that charts dates relative to the movements of Venus.

"He took the position that his work removed the last obstacle to fully accepting the GMT constant," Aldana said in a statement. "Others took his work even further, suggesting that he had proven the GMT constant to be correct." But according to Aldana, Lounsbury's evidence is far from irrefutable.

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NASA Sees Potential Solar Problems in 2012

A group of NASA researchers have added startling reinforcement to the gathering concerns about the year 2012. In a report entitled Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts, they describe consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy capable of disrupting Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting the planet’s energy grids.

According to the report, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield. But, according to Wired magazine, the report has received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012’s supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous "birth of a new era."

Whether the Mayans were on to something won’t be known for several years. But Lawrence Joseph, author of Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End, told Wired magazine: "I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t until the report came out that this really began to freak me out."

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Click here to purchase a copy of the Severe Space Weather Events report.