Continental Drift

Initially Earth was a water covered planet once it cooled enough to have liquid water. Significant landmasses–continents– started to rise above the water 3 to 3.5 billion years ago. Those were borne on continental tectonic plates, as distinguished from oceanic tectonic plates. Here’s a visualization of the movement of the continental plates over the past 540 million years, a period where we have enough data to generate reasonable facsimiles of those plates.