Rabat through 600 million years

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

The Cambrian explosion

Rabat lay at 68° south.

Life reaches land

Rabat lay at 79° south.

Farthest south.

Rabat lay at 89° south.

Rabat crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Rabat lay at 13° north, the latitude of Aden today.

The great extinction

Rabat lay at 22° north, the latitude of Qinzhou today.

Homo sapiens

Rabat lay at 34° north, its latitude today.

Rabat today.

34° north. In 600 million years the plates have carried it some 32,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 38° south; 600 million years ago
Farthest south: 89° south; 440 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 290 million years ago
Distance travelled: 32,000 kilometres; 600 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.