Aalborg through 600 million years

Aalborg lay at 52° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Aalborg lay at 43° south.

Life reaches land

Aalborg lay at 38° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

Aalborg crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Aalborg lay at 33° north, the latitude of Baghdad today.

The great extinction

Aalborg lay at 46° north, the latitude of Ljubljana today.

Homo sapiens

Aalborg lay at 57° north, its latitude today.

Aalborg today.

57° north. In 600 million years the plates have carried it some 38,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 52° south; 600 million years ago
Farthest south: 61° south; 590 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 340 million years ago
Distance travelled: 38,000 kilometres; 600 million years

other places

Positions come from the plate model of Merdith and colleagues (2021), through the GPlates Web Service of the EarthByte Group at the University of Sydney. The globe shows today's coastlines carried back with their plates, not the shorelines of the time, so it does not say whether a place was land or sea. Cities and their coordinates come from Wikidata.