Jeddah through 850 million years

Jeddah lay at 3° south, the latitude of Gitega today.

The Cambrian explosion

Jeddah lay at 52° south.

Farthest south.

Jeddah lay at 65° south.

Life reaches land

Jeddah lay at 58° south.

The first dinosaurs

Jeddah lay at 15° south, the latitude of Lusaka today.

Jeddah crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Jeddah lay at 2° north, the latitude of Mogadishu today.

Homo sapiens

Jeddah lay at 21° north, its latitude today.

Jeddah today.

22° north. In 850 million years the plates have carried it some 38,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 3° south; 850 million years ago
Farthest south: 65° south; 500 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 90 million years ago
Distance travelled: 38,000 kilometres; 850 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.