Accra through 1 billion years

Accra lay at 50° south.

Farthest south.

Accra lay at 84° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Accra lay at 83° south.

Life reaches land

Accra lay at 59° south.

The first dinosaurs

Accra lay at 15° south, the latitude of Lusaka today.

The great extinction

Accra lay at 7° south, the latitude of Dar es Salaam today.

Homo sapiens

Accra lay at 5° north, its latitude today.

Accra today.

6° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 48,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 50° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 84° south; 570 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 10 million years ago
Distance travelled: 48,000 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.