Yichang through 700 million years

Yichang lay at 38° north, the latitude of Seoul today.

Yichang crosses the equator.

Heading south.

The Cambrian explosion

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

Life reaches land

Yichang lay at 20° south, the latitude of Sucre today.

Yichang crosses the equator.

Heading north.

The first dinosaurs

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

Farthest north.

Yichang lay at 56° north.

The great extinction

Yichang lay at 33° north, the latitude of Tripoli today.

Homo sapiens

Yichang lay at 31° north, its latitude today.

Yichang today.

31° north. In 700 million years the plates have carried it some 44,000 kilometres.

latitude through time

Oldest position in the model: 38° north; 700 million years ago
Farthest south: 21° south; 510 million years ago
Farthest north: 56° north; 210 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 570 million years ago
Crossed the equator: 430 million years ago
Distance travelled: 44,000 kilometres; 700 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.