The Yom/Day 3 is the longest day of Genesis 1, lasting from about 3.3 billion years ago to about 410 million years ago. One reason that it is this long is that it covers two events – continents forming and then plants appearing on the continental land masses. 

By around 4.3 billion years ago, Earth was essentially a water-covered world with little or no persistent dry land. As cooling continued between about 4.3 and 4.0 billion years ago, the magma beneath the ocean solidified into a primitive crust. These buoyant crust fragments may have risen above sea level as small islands or island chains, though they were unstable and short-lived. By around 4.0 billion years ago, the first long-lived continental nuclei—known as cratons—started to form. Land at this stage was no longer purely transient. Over the next several hundred million years, from about 3.2 to 2.5 billion years ago, continental growth accelerated. By around 2.5 billion years ago, the total volume of continental crust had reached a large fraction of its modern value. From about 2.5 to 1.8 billion years ago, the large supercontinent-scale land masses then emerged and transformed into various different shapes over time. 

The transition of life from the oceans onto land occurred gradually between roughly 470 and 360 million years ago. The first plant-like colonizers were microbial communities and fungi, which helped create the earliest soils. Soon after, simple plants had structures to retain water and withstand exposure to air, allowing them to spread across moist coastal environments. These early plants fundamentally changed Earth’s surface by stabilizing soils and increasing oxygen production. By 360 million years ago (the Late Devonian period / Paleozoic Era / Phanerozoic Eon) then Earth began supporting the first true forests.