How was the Earth’s land made?
Right after the Earth was formed, it was covered by a sea of hot magma. Once oceans eventually formed, the Earth was almost completely covered by oceans. If you looked at just the surface, you would think the Earth was a ball of water.
But how was land made if everything was covered by water? Let's take a look at the bottom of the oceans and the inside of the Earth. The ocean floor was covered by the Earth’s crust. The crust is made up of a thin layer of rock. Under the crust was a hot mass of rock called the mantle.
Several hundred million years after the Earth was formed, an even hotter core formed in the center of the Earth. The super-hot core heated the mantle, which made the mantle lighter and caused it to rise up. This mantle was cooled at the ocean floor and became plates, or bedrock. These plates moved with the flow of the mantle and collided with other plates. At the boundaries where plates collided, lots of islands were formed. The islands were made of a light rock called granite. It’s thought these granite islands collided and clumped together, eventually creating continents.
