India’s Singhbhum region may have been Earth’s earliest continental land to rise above the ocean 3.2 billion years ago, scientists said on Monday, announcing findings that push back the emergence of continents by 700 million years. “The Singhbhum region is possibly Earth’s earliest continental land exposed to the air,” Priyadarshi Chowdhury, a geologist at Australia’s Monash University who led the study, told The Telegraph. “Before that, Earth was a water world, the whole planet covered by water.”But, Chowdhury said, patches of the earliest continental land also exist in Australia and South Africa. “This is the most direct, unambiguous date yet for the emergence of continental land,” Chowdhury said. The emergence of continental land would have created shallow seas that are ideal habitats for organisms called cyanobacteria to flourish.

Source: The Telegraph November 09, 2021 09:19 UTC