Fact Check: Amitabh Bachchan's claim that monsoons are 400 million years old is FALSE.

Hyderabad: Amitabh Bachchan, who has over 43.8 million followers, on Thursday night tweeted that "T 3633 - Did you know that the MONSOONS are 400 million years old ? read it somewhere .. BUT how and who calculated it ..?"

The post was retweeted 2,100 times and got 40,500 likes.

Archive of the claim can be found here.

Fact Check:

Our monsoons are only 40 million years old. The claim is FALSE.

According to the Science Daily, a new study by an international research team found that Asian monsoons are one of the largest climate systems in the world that existed for more than 40 million years.

Previously, scientists believed the monsoon to be 22-25 million years old as a result of the uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and the Himalaya Mountains. But according to reports, an international research team has now found that the Asian monsoon already existed 40 million years ago during a period of high atmospheric carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures.

This is not the first time Mr Bachchan posted false claims.

He previously made an apology after wrongly crediting his father, poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, for a poem which was written by lyricist and poet Prasoon Joshi. He admitted to the blunder in a follow-up tweet and apologised for the error.

He was criticized for posting a forward which says "how Prime Minister Narendra Modi's call to Indians to cling thalis on 'Amavasya' was a masterstroke to fight the Coronavirus". By the time he deleted the tweet–without any clarification–it had already garnered 254 retweets and 2,300 likes.

After 'Amavasya' tweet, Bachchan's claims that Coronavirus spreads through flies, drew flak from netizens and health ministry.

He promoted a private website as an official Coronavirus dashboard updating every 4 hours.

Our monsoons are just 40 million years old and not 400 million years. Maybe, Mr Bachchan has made a mistake with numbering as he did several times with the numbers of his tweets.

previously, Amitabh Bachchan apologized to a fan who pointed out his mistake in the numbering of tweets.

Hence, the claim is FALSE.