North America is a beautiful continent that’s home to the Rockies, Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and many more natural wonders. How did that happen? How did North America get its shape? The answer is that it took millions and millions of years. Over the history of Earth, tectonic plates have smashed into each other and dove under one another to literally move continents and create everything we see above ground.
It’s fun to track our planet’s history to see how many different shapes North America once had, and how things like the mountain ranges on its edges got created (two land masses smashing into each other to boost the ground up). Watch Ted-Ed explain it below.
