Abu Dhabi through 600 million years

Abu Dhabi lay at 8° north, the latitude of Freetown today.

The Cambrian explosion

Abu Dhabi lay at 37° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

Farthest south.

Abu Dhabi lay at 52° south.

Life reaches land

Abu Dhabi lay at 46° south.

The first dinosaurs

Abu Dhabi lay at 16° south, the latitude of Brasília today.

Abu Dhabi crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Abu Dhabi lay at 3° north, the latitude of Kuala Lumpur today.

Homo sapiens

Abu Dhabi lay at 24° north, its latitude today.

Abu Dhabi today.

24° north. In 600 million years the plates have carried it some 28,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 8° north; 600 million years ago
Farthest south: 52° south; 500 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 590 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 90 million years ago
Distance travelled: 28,000 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.