Paramaribo through 1 billion years

Paramaribo lay at 38° south, the latitude of Melbourne today.

The Cambrian explosion

Paramaribo lay at 75° south.

Life reaches land

Paramaribo lay at 54° south.

The first dinosaurs

Paramaribo lay at 7° south, the latitude of Dar es Salaam today.

Paramaribo crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The great extinction

Paramaribo lay on the equator.

Paramaribo crosses the equator.

Heading north.

Homo sapiens

Paramaribo lay at 6° north, its latitude today.

Paramaribo today.

6° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 50,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 38° south; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 76° south; 540 million years ago
Farthest north: 7° north; 120 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 190 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 70 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 30 million years ago
Distance travelled: 50,000 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.