Brasília through 1 billion years

Brasília lay at 61° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Brasília lay at 68° south.

Life reaches land

Brasília lay at 45° south.

Farthest south.

Brasília lay at 85° south.

The first dinosaurs

Brasília lay at 29° south, the latitude of Bloemfontein today.

The great extinction

Brasília lay at 22° south, the latitude of Windhoek today.

Homo sapiens

Brasília lay at 16° south, its latitude today.

Brasília today.

16° south. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 50,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 61° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 85° south; 420 million years ago
Farthest north: 15° south; 120 million years ago
Distance travelled: 50,000 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.