Kanpur through 700 million years

Kanpur lay at 27° north, the latitude of Shaoyang today.

Kanpur crosses the equator.

Heading south.

The Cambrian explosion

Kanpur lay at 28° south, the latitude of Lobamba today.

Life reaches land

Kanpur lay at 28° south, the latitude of Bloemfontein today.

Farthest south.

Kanpur lay at 63° south.

The first dinosaurs

Kanpur lay at 37° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

The great extinction

Kanpur lay at 21° south.

Kanpur crosses the equator.

Heading north.

Homo sapiens

Kanpur lay at 26° north, its latitude today.

Kanpur today.

26° north. In 700 million years the plates have carried it some 41,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 27° north; 700 million years ago
Farthest south: 63° south; 330 million years ago
Farthest north: 30° north; 670 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 590 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 50 million years ago
Distance travelled: 41,000 kilometres; 700 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.