Abidjan through 1 billion years

Abidjan lay at 37° south, the latitude of Canberra today.

Farthest south.

Abidjan lay at 87° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Abidjan lay at 83° south.

Life reaches land

Abidjan lay at 58° south.

The first dinosaurs

Abidjan lay at 13° south, the latitude of Apia today.

Abidjan crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Abidjan lay at 6° south, the latitude of Dodoma today.

Homo sapiens

Abidjan lay at 5° north, its latitude today.

Abidjan today.

5° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 52,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 37° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 87° south; 570 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 120 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 110 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 10 million years ago
Distance travelled: 52,000 kilometres; 1 billion 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.