Geologist Adrian Helmsley discovers that an unprecedented surge of solar radiation is overheating the Earth's core and destabilizing the planet's crust, heralding an imminent global catastrophe. While the world's governments secretly build gigantic arks to save a fraction of humanity, writer Jackson Curtis fights desperately to get his family to safety amid earthquakes, eruptions and tidal waves that devour entire cities. Roland Emmerich takes disaster cinema to its greatest scale with a display of spectacular apocalyptic destruction, inspired by the prophecies about the end of the Mayan calendar.