Surat through 1 billion years

Surat lay at 2° north, the latitude of Ciudad de la Paz today.

Farthest north.

Surat lay at 66° north.

Surat crosses the equator.

Heading south.

The Cambrian explosion

Surat lay at 36° south, the latitude of Canberra today.

Life reaches land

Surat lay at 36° south, the latitude of Canberra today.

Farthest south.

Surat lay at 65° south.

The first dinosaurs

Surat lay at 35° south, the latitude of Montevideo today.

The great extinction

Surat lay at 24° south, the latitude of São Paulo today.

Surat crosses the equator.

Heading north.

Homo sapiens

Surat lay at 21° north, its latitude today.

Surat today.

21° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 56,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 2° north; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 65° south; 340 million years ago
Farthest north: 66° north; 810 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 600 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 40 million years ago
Distance travelled: 56,000 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.