When our Sun was young, it melted most of the ice and cooked the ur-mineral dust nearby. The resulting dry pebbles collided to form rocky inner planets, while frozen gas and ice giants formed farther out. Colossal collisions heated the Earth until it melted all the way through! Heavy molten iron sank to the core, with rocky slag floating to the top. The molten iron circulates still, thousands of miles beneath our feet, spinning up a magnetic field that shields Earth from the violence of the Sun. The hot olivine mantle produced blobs of partly melted slush that rose as basalt magma, floating as a thin crust atop the mantle below. Some of the basalt produced pockets of partial melt that became buoyant floating continents made of gray granite. Convection currents below carried the granitic continents around like rafts, crashing them into one another over and over.
Eventually the crust of the molten Earth cooled enough that its steamy volcanic atmosphere condensed and as a result there were millions of years of rain. The water filled the lowest topography, the black basalt basins between the higher granitic continents. Once the oceans were full, anything that could dissolve did. This included acidic volcanic gases in the air as well as some of the land minerals.
When granitic continental rocks dissolve, the iron-rich black minerals dissolve more easily than the aluminum-rich white minerals. Lighter feldspars are transformed into clays. Translucent quartz dissolves poorly. The rocks fall apart, leaving sand grains of quartz and feldspar behind, sweeping little particles of clay downstream, and delivering dissolved minerals to the oceans below. When water evaporates from the oceans, the dissolved material is left behind as sea salt.
Slowly, the rocks of the Earth evolved new minerals as all this dissolving and reshuffling introduced more and more water into the chemistry of the crystals. The hydrated minerals were less dense, and tended to make continental rocks even more buoyant compared to the dense basalt of the ocean basins and the even denser olivine mantle beneath. And when crustal plates were subsumed into the hot depths, the watery minerals produced volcanic magma that was much more explosive and eruptive than the slowly burbling basalts.