Where was your town 300 million years ago?
Stuttgart lay almost on the equator back then, in the mountains of a supercontinent. Enter your place and watch it travel through time on its tectonic plate.
Place
At 0 Ma (today) you can also tap a point on the globe.
Where the place was
- PALEOMAP
- Merdith 2021
Time jumps
Bedrock at the place
What comes out
Germany came from the South Pole across the equator.
Calculated for Stuttgart with two plate models. Latitude is reliable, longitude is not – the Earth’s magnetic field only reveals latitude.
- 1.6–7.2° N
- Position of Stuttgart 300 million years ago, in the Carboniferous – almost on the equator, depending on the model.
- 64–71° S
- 450 million years ago, in the Ordovician, the same region lay close to the South Pole.
- 511 km
- separate Berlin and Stuttgart today. 420 million years ago it was more than 5,000 km – they sat on different microcontinents.
Cross-check: our in-browser calculation matches the reference software pyGPlates for eight places to within a hundredth of a degree.
How to read the globe
The Earth of the time, today’s coastlines.
The colours show the landscape of the chosen time: dark blue for deep ocean, lighter for shallow shelf seas, green and brown for land, pale for high mountains. Today’s coastlines lie thinly on top, rotated with their plates – so you can recognise Africa or South America even where they are still joined.
Yellow is the outline of Germany, white your place and its track. The solid line is the PALEOMAP model, the dashed one the model by Merdith and colleagues. Where they diverge, geologists know less precisely.
Method
How a place becomes a journey.
- 1
Your place sits on a tectonic plate today. Which one is defined by the model’s plate boundaries, which we stored in advance as a raster at a quarter of a degree, finer for Germany.
- 2
For each plate the model contains rotations at reference times, usually every 5 to 20 million years, each relative to a neighbouring plate. Your browser reads them, converts them to quaternions and interpolates evenly in between.
- 3
The rotations are chained along the plate hierarchy to the reference frame and applied to your place. That gives its position at any time. Our calculation matches the reference software pyGPlates to a few thousandths of a degree.
- 4
The landscape comes from the PaleoDEMs by Scotese and Wright, one elevation map every five million years, blended between two maps. It belongs to the PALEOMAP model; Merdith therefore only shows the track.
- 5
The bedrock at your place comes from the BGR’s Geological Map of Germany 1:1,000,000. We derive its age from the name of the unit via the international time scale.
Limits
- A model, not a measurement: two models differ by about 6 degrees 300 million years ago and by up to 10 degrees 500 million years ago.
- Latitude comes from the magnetism of old rocks, longitude does not. Where the globe shows your place east–west is a convention of the model.
- The landscape is coarse – one degree, about 110 kilometres. It shows the region, not the place. Coastlines are today’s coasts in old positions.
- For places in Germany the calculation reaches back 540 million years; ocean floors are often much younger. If the ground did not exist yet, the globe says so.
- The bedrock comes from an overview map and shows the surface of the area, not a borehole – not a geotechnical survey.
Sources and licences
Where the data comes from.
- Plate model: C. R. Scotese, PALEOMAP PaleoAtlas for GPlates (2016), CC BY 4.0
- Landscape: C. R. Scotese, N. Wright, PALEOMAP Paleodigital Elevation Models (PaleoDEMS), 2018, CC BY 4.0
- Comparison model: A. S. Merdith et al., Extending full-plate tectonic models into deep time, Earth-Science Reviews 214 (2021), model CC BY 4.0
- Bedrock: Geological Map of Germany 1:1,000,000 (GK1000) © BGR, Hanover; terms GeoNutzV; simplified
- Time scale: International Commission on Stratigraphy, International Chronostratigraphic Chart v2026/06, CC BY 4.0
- Places: GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0 · Outline of Germany: Natural Earth (public domain)
Questions
Frequently asked questions about Urort.
Where was Germany 300 million years ago?
Almost on the equator. For Stuttgart the models give 1.6 to 7.2 degrees north. Germany lay inside the emerging supercontinent Pangaea, in the middle of the Variscan mountains, whose remains are today’s Harz, Black Forest and Ore Mountains.
Why do two models show different things?
Both use magnetism, rocks and fossils, but weigh them differently and assemble the plates differently. The older the time, the less evidence – and the further the models diverge. The gap between the two lines is an honest measure of uncertainty.
Were Berlin and Stuttgart always neighbours?
No. Northern Germany belonged to Avalonia, southern Germany to Armorica – two microcontinents that collided only about 330 million years ago. 420 million years ago more than 5,000 kilometres lay between the two cities.
Is my location stored?
No. The “My location” button asks your browser, and the calculation runs there. Nothing is stored; only when you share a link does the place appear, rounded to about a kilometre, after the # sign of the address.
Does it work for places outside Germany?
Yes, the drift works for any place in the world. Bedrock is shown only for Germany, because we have no worldwide map with a suitable licence.
Space and time in your geodata?
Maps that move, terrain people understand, measurements in the right place: we build geodata tools that run in the browser.