Addis Ababa through 850 million years

Addis Ababa lay at 10° south, the latitude of Luanda today.

The Cambrian explosion

Addis Ababa lay at 50° south.

Life reaches land

Addis Ababa lay at 50° south.

Farthest south.

Addis Ababa lay at 66° south.

The first dinosaurs

Addis Ababa lay at 26° south, the latitude of Pretoria today.

The great extinction

Addis Ababa lay at 9° south, the latitude of Luanda today.

Addis Ababa crosses the equator.

Heading north.

Homo sapiens

Addis Ababa lay at 9° north, its latitude today.

Addis Ababa today.

9° north. In 850 million years the plates have carried it some 39,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 10° south; 850 million years ago
Farthest south: 66° south; 350 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 30 million years ago
Distance travelled: 39,000 kilometres; 850 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.