Oslo through 1 billion years

Oslo lay at 31° south.

Farthest south.

Oslo lay at 66° south.

The Cambrian explosion

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

Life reaches land

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

Oslo crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Oslo lay at 36° north, the latitude of Anyang today.

The great extinction

Oslo lay at 49° north, the latitude of Paris today.

Homo sapiens

Oslo lay at 60° north, its latitude today.

Oslo today.

60° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 55,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 31° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 66° south; 870 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 340 million years ago
Distance travelled: 55,000 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.