Dar es Salaam through 550 million years

Dar es Salaam lay at 47° south.

Life reaches land

Dar es Salaam lay at 37° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

Farthest south.

Dar es Salaam lay at 78° south.

The first dinosaurs

Dar es Salaam lay at 41° south, the latitude of Wellington today.

The great extinction

Dar es Salaam lay at 25° south, the latitude of Gaborone today.

Homo sapiens

Dar es Salaam lay at 7° south, its latitude today.

Dar es Salaam today.

7° south. In 550 million years the plates have carried it some 27,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 47° south; 550 million years ago
Farthest south: 78° south; 340 million years ago
Distance travelled: 27,000 kilometres; 550 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.