"The main thing to know," said the storyteller,"is that the inside of the earth is hotter than it is outside."

"Whoa!!!, Stop right there," says our student. "Why? Why? Why?"

"I was hoping I could get by without explaining that." said the professor.

"No such luck," smiles the student.

"I'll come back to it,"mutters the teacher. "Right now, just accept what I said. The earth is hotter inside than the outside. The rest is easy."

The stuff in the earth beneath the rock layer (in the mantle) moves slowly, like silly putty. Because heat moves from hot to cold, and because it is colder near the rock layer, the stuff in the mantle layer flows upward toward the earth's surface. The cooler stuff in the mantle layer, which is more dense, sinks down to take its place. This makes a convection current inside the earth which moves in a gigantic loop.

As the convection current moves along beneath the rock layer, it tugs at the overlying rock layer and drags it to a different place. Geologists have measured how fast the rock layer moves, and it moves about 5 cm to 10 cm in a year. This is how Antarctica was moved, slowly but surely, to its present location at the South Pole.

"So now," says the storyteller, "you know why the continent moved and I can finally say that...the Blue Whale is the biggest animal ever because the earth is hotter on the inside than it is on the outside.

And that really is the end of the story."

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