Continuous closure of sheaves

We give a purely algebraic construction of the continuous closure of any finitely generated torsion free module; a concept first studied by H.~Brenner and M.~Hochster. The construction implies that, at least in characteristic 0, taking continuous closure commutes with flat morphisms whose fibers are semi-normal. This implies that the continuous closure of a coherent ideal sheaf is again a coherent ideal sheaf (both in the Zariski and in the 'etale topologies) and it commutes with field extensions.