Cape Town through 500 million years

Cape Town lay at 32° south.

Life reaches land

Cape Town lay at 20° south, the latitude of Sucre today.

Farthest south.

Cape Town lay at 76° south.

The first dinosaurs

Cape Town lay at 56° south.

The great extinction

Cape Town lay at 49° south.

Homo sapiens

Cape Town lay at 34° south, its latitude today.

Cape Town today.

34° south. In 500 million years the plates have carried it some 28,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 32° south; 500 million years ago
Farthest south: 76° south; 410 million years ago
Farthest north: 18° south; 450 million years ago
Distance travelled: 28,000 kilometres; 500 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.