Rio de Janeiro through 520 million years

Rio de Janeiro lay at 56° south.

Life reaches land

Rio de Janeiro lay at 42° south, the latitude of Wellington today.

Farthest south.

Rio de Janeiro lay at 85° south.

The first dinosaurs

Rio de Janeiro lay at 36° south, the latitude of Canberra today.

The great extinction

Rio de Janeiro lay at 30° south, the latitude of Maseru today.

Homo sapiens

Rio de Janeiro lay at 23° south, its latitude today.

Rio de Janeiro today.

23° south. In 520 million years the plates have carried it some 29,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 56° south; 520 million years ago
Farthest south: 85° south; 400 million years ago
Farthest north: 22° south; 120 million years ago
Distance travelled: 29,000 kilometres; 520 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.