Ashgabat through 250 million years

Ashgabat lay at 34° north, the latitude of Xi'an today.

The first dinosaurs

Ashgabat lay at 44° north, the latitude of Bucharest today.

Farthest north.

Ashgabat lay at 54° north.

The great extinction

Ashgabat lay at 31° north, the latitude of Nanchong today.

Homo sapiens

Ashgabat lay at 38° north, its latitude today.

Ashgabat today.

38° north. In 250 million years the plates have carried it some 9,100 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 34° north; 250 million years ago
Farthest south: 31° north; 70 million years ago
Farthest north: 54° north; 200 million years ago
Distance travelled: 9,100 kilometres; 250 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.