Samuel the Lamanite foretold a great cataclysm on the American continent 38 years in advance of the event. Samuel prophesied:
Yea, at the time that he shall yield up the ghost there shall be thunderings and lightnings. . . and the earth shall shake and tremble. And the rocks which are upon the face of this earth . . . shall be broken up. Yea, they shall be rent in twain, and shall ever after be found in seams and in cracks, and in broken fragments upon the face of the whole earth . . . (Helaman 14:21-22)
Comparing interestingly to this prophecy of Samuel the Lamanite are the words of Ralph L. Roys who toured the land of Yucatan in about 1940 and observed the following:
The remains of many ancient cities, already long deserted at the time of the conquest, are found in the region of Campeche, Yucatan, and Lundell suggests the possibility that these savannas are, in part at least, the result of soil exhaustion from excessive cultivation. In spite of the flatness of the northern plain, it is so broken by limestone reefs and depressions that it can be described only as choppy and there are great quantities of loose stone lying everywhere.
Further to this, considering the land of Guatemala we find the Spanish conqueror Pedro de Alvarado, in a letter to Cortes dated the 15th of October, 1522, expressing a lively frustration over the broken up state of the land, as follows: "This land is very full of gullies. There are gullies two hundred estados (about 1,000 feet) in depth, and on account of them, one cannot carry on war and punish these people as they deserve." [Ammon O'Brien, Seeing beyond Today with Ancient America, p. 364]