Understanding physical geography and landforms is a crucial part of any GCSE geography syllabus. From mountains to beaches, the surface scenery is heavily influenced by the rocks beneath the surface and by what has happened to them. The first step to understanding the processes that give us the countryside we see around us is to discover the three main groups of rock and how they are related to each other.
The Earth started life as a collection of dust and gas orbiting the Sun. Gradually, gravity brought the materials together to form the early Earth. This was a high energy environment, chunks of rock from the size of dust particles to lumps that were many kilometres across crashed into each other. By the time that all of the dust, rocks and gas had collected into a single planet, it was a hot, volcanic place with a thin solid crust and molten centre.