Joey Minard, age 7, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, for his question:

How do mountains get under the sea?

The waters of the sea are deep, very deep. In some places they dip more than three miles below the tossing waves on the top. But all of the seas have solid floors of rocky materials which are part of the earth's crust. This rocky layer covers the outside of our round globe, land and sea alike, like a skin. The earth's crust is a bit restless. Pieces of it sometimes tumble and topple around. The earth's crust moves in a big way, but as a rule it m o ves so slowly that we do not notice the changes for ages.

Some of these changes cause mountains to poke up from hollows in the earth's crust. This happens in the crust that is dry land. It also happens in the crust that is under the watery ocean. Mountains take millions of years to grow to their full height. The young ones that begin to grow on the bed of the sea are way out of sight. Some of them never grow tall enough to peep above the waves, but others do, and these we see as islands of dry land.