Earth's demise may not come from the skies. It most likely will come from within. Not since the infancy of our solar system has Earth undergone such titanic geological upheavals. Rift zones are tearing the world apart, tectonic plates rampage under land masses causing earthquakes of immeasurable magnitude, continents being split into pieces then consumed by half-mile high tsunamis. Earth's lands have ceased to exist except for three insignificant stubs of land; a scant remnant of Montana where vacationing Ross Nielson has joined up with a group of picnicking school children. Another is a 9,000 seamount in the bay of Ecuador housing a team of geologists, and the third an uninhabited dot of Australia. The Montana and Ecuador survivors, a family cruising the Pacific on their yacht, and the remnant crew of a devastated Coast Guard ship bring the Earth's total known population to fifty. Intimate snapshots of an estranged father and son on the verge of a reunion, an airliner's crew, a Hawaiian priest and a revenge-seeking girl sketch the poignancy of their last hours before being claimed by this unprecedented catastrophe.