All the natural disasters have convinced people the world is about to end

A 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Mexico on Tuesday, 123km from Mexico City, killing at least 230 people across the region.

Rescue crews continue to search for survivors and more than 40 buildings collapsed in Mexico City alone, with thousands more left damaged.

At least 25 people, most of them children, were reported dead when the Enrique Rebsamen School in Mexico City collapsed.

The disaster follows Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the United States and the Caribbean, and floods in Nigeria, Niger and Sierra Leone.

People have been tweeting, rather insensitively, that the natural disasters are a sign of a forthcoming apocalypse, tying into a popular conspiracy theory.

The apocalypse theory goes as follows.

An astrological alignment involving the constellations Leo and Virgo and several planets coordinates with a passage from the Bible, Revelations 12: 1-2 which reads:

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.

She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth.

The woman represents Virgo, the crown is Leo and the feet is the moon.

The sun will pass through the alignment on 23 September.

Ergo: seven years destruction, the antichrist, the reckoning and a series of other bad things because that's what religion says...

It's all,obviously, rather ridiculous - no matter how you look at it.

Climate change, however, is very real and scientifically proven.

More from the Independent: Mexico City earthquake: Children trapped under rubble 'plead for help over WhatsApp'