Luanda through 1 billion years

Luanda lay at 51° south.

The Cambrian explosion

Luanda lay at 65° south.

Life reaches land

Luanda lay at 46° south.

Farthest south.

Luanda lay at 89° south.

The first dinosaurs

Luanda lay at 33° south, the latitude of Santiago today.

The great extinction

Luanda lay at 24° south, the latitude of São Paulo today.

Homo sapiens

Luanda lay at 9° south, its latitude today.

Luanda today.

9° south. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 47,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 51° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 89° south; 400 million years ago
Distance travelled: 47,000 kilometres; 1 billion 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.