Bern through 600 million years

Bern lay at 16° south, the latitude of Lusaka today.

The Cambrian explosion

Bern lay at 48° south.

Life reaches land

Bern lay at 71° south.

Farthest south.

Bern lay at 72° south.

Bern crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Bern lay at 25° north, the latitude of Karachi today.

The great extinction

Bern lay at 36° north, the latitude of Qingdao today.

Homo sapiens

Bern lay at 47° north, its latitude today.

Bern today.

47° north. In 600 million years the plates have carried it some 32,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 16° south; 600 million years ago
Farthest south: 72° south; 450 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 320 million years ago
Distance travelled: 32,000 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.