Maputo through 550 million years

Maputo lay at 41° south, the latitude of Wellington today.

Life reaches land

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

Farthest south.

Maputo lay at 81° south.

The first dinosaurs

Maputo lay at 57° south.

The great extinction

Maputo lay at 43° south.

Homo sapiens

Maputo lay at 26° south, its latitude today.

Maputo today.

26° south. In 550 million years the plates have carried it some 30,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 41° south; 550 million years ago
Farthest south: 81° south; 340 million years ago
Farthest north: 20° south; 450 million years ago
Distance travelled: 30,000 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.