Bloemfontein through 1 billion years

Bloemfontein lay at 4° north, the latitude of Bangui today.

Bloemfontein crosses the equator.

Heading south.

The Cambrian explosion

Bloemfontein lay at 41° south, the latitude of Wellington today.

Life reaches land

Bloemfontein lay at 23° south, the latitude of Rio de Janeiro today.

Farthest south.

Bloemfontein lay at 75° south.

The first dinosaurs

Bloemfontein lay at 57° south.

The great extinction

Bloemfontein lay at 46° south.

Homo sapiens

Bloemfontein lay at 29° south, its latitude today.

Bloemfontein today.

29° south. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 48,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 4° north; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 75° south; 410 million years ago
Farthest north: 14° north; 940 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 920 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.