Lilongwe through 650 million years

Lilongwe lay at 23° south, the latitude of Rio de Janeiro today.

The Cambrian explosion

Lilongwe lay at 47° south.

Life reaches land

Lilongwe lay at 34° south, the latitude of Cape Town today.

Farthest south.

Lilongwe lay at 83° south.

The first dinosaurs

Lilongwe lay at 47° south.

The great extinction

Lilongwe lay at 32° south.

Homo sapiens

Lilongwe lay at 14° south, its latitude today.

Lilongwe today.

14° south. In 650 million years the plates have carried it some 35,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 23° south; 650 million years ago
Farthest south: 83° south; 340 million years ago
Distance travelled: 35,000 kilometres; 650 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.