Shangqiu through 1 billion years

Shangqiu lay at 39° north, the latitude of Pyongyang today.

Farthest north.

Shangqiu lay at 65° north.

The Cambrian explosion

Shangqiu lay at 17° north, the latitude of Yangon today.

Shangqiu crosses the equator.

Heading south.

Life reaches land

Shangqiu lay at 12° south, the latitude of Lima today.

Shangqiu crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Shangqiu lay at 48° north, the latitude of Ulaanbaatar today.

The great extinction

Shangqiu lay at 37° north, the latitude of Seoul today.

Homo sapiens

Shangqiu lay at 35° north, its latitude today.

Shangqiu today.

34° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 62,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 39° north; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 14° south; 460 million years ago
Farthest north: 65° north; 730 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 510 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 440 million years ago
Distance travelled: 62,000 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.