EARTH’S FIRST LANDMASS

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• It suggests this happened 700 million years earlier — about 3.2 billion years ago — and that the earliest continental landmass to emerge may have been Jharkhand’s Singhbhum region.
  
  
• The study, by researchers from India, Australia and the US, has been published in the journal PNAS.
  
  
• Scientists have found sandstones in Singhbhum with geological signatures of ancient river channels, tidal plains and beaches over 3.2 billion years old, representing the earliest crust exposed to air.
  
  
• The researchers studied the granites that form the continental crust of Singhbhum region.