Xinyang through 1 billion years

Xinyang lay at 41° north, the latitude of Istanbul today.

Farthest north.

Xinyang lay at 66° north.

The Cambrian explosion

Xinyang lay at 16° north, the latitude of Khartoum today.

Xinyang crosses the equator.

Heading south.

Life reaches land

Xinyang lay at 14° south, the latitude of Lilongwe today.

Xinyang crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

Xinyang lay at 47° north, the latitude of Bern today.

The great extinction

Xinyang lay at 35° north, the latitude of Kabul today.

Homo sapiens

Xinyang lay at 32° north, its latitude today.

Xinyang today.

32° north. In 1 billion years the plates have carried it some 63,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 41° north; 1 billion years ago
Farthest south: 16° south; 460 million years ago
Farthest north: 66° north; 730 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 510 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 440 million years ago
Distance travelled: 63,000 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.