Newsday from New York, New York • 118

lines. 7 CL 6861 NEWSDAY, JUNE 11, FRIDAY, and WHERE COVER STORY Journey to The Center of Earth EARTH from Page B11 Through A new look at the Spanish Master EXCLUSIVE HOTEL PACKAGES Packages include one night's accommodations for two Two VIP tickets for the Philadelphia Museum of Art Breakfast for two Complimentary parking at your hotel Best Western Crowne Plaza Center City 215-561-7500 215-568-8300 $129 $179 wkdav. Seasons Hotel $119 wknd The Four 215-963-1500 $265 The Lathem Hotel 215-563-7474 $145 Omni Hotel at Independence Park The Rittenhouse Hotel 215-925-0000 215-546-9000 $299 $209 wkday, The Warwick Hotel $189 wknd Towers The Ritz-Carlton, 215-735-6000 $179 Philadelphia Special rates are subject to 215-563-1600 S245 availability Special AMTRAK discounts are available (800-USA-RAIL. Fare Order X884) The exhibition is made possible by. ADVANTA Organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

the des Nationaux. France, and the Citv of dos Beaux- Arts. Additional support was provided by the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. The Women's Committee, Gisela and Dennis Alter. Helen B.

Alter. Mrs. Mever Eglin, an anonymous donor. and TO Philadelphia 26th Street and Benjamin Franklin For information, call (215) 763-8100 For Philadelphia visitor information, Francisco Gova, Les Tennes 1814-19 Oil on canvas 181cm 122cm Palais de -Arts, Lille Parkway Museum of Art YD.69YP0530 www.philamuseum.org call 1 (877)-8PHILLY 17 PHILADELPHIA AB OP TUV XYZ You Spell It. We'll Sell (516) 843-3000 Call (718) 343-9000 is for CL142A4X32 racquets Newsday days planet.

And unlike most museum exhibitions, we have the opportunity to be tactile here, because, after all, we're dealing with rocks. "We're encouraging everyone to touch and feel," he adds. And as many of the videos accompanying the exhibits show, geology is very much a hands-on science. "We go in the field and get dirty," Mathez says, Among the dynamic Earth features you can touch in the Hall of Planet Earth are an earthquake fault line from Essex County, N.Y.; the oldest known rock on the planet: a meteorite recovered from the Northwest Territories in Canada that's about 4 billion years old, and the oldest known substance of any kind on the planet: zircon crystals that go back an incomprehensibly exact 4.276 billion years. (The precisely measured decay of uranium within zircon enables scientists to pinpoint its age.) The hall is organized around five basic questions about our planet: How has Earth evolved? Why are there ocean basins, continents and mountains? How do we "read" rocks to discover Earth's history? What causes climate and climate change? And why is Earth habitable? Video and computer interactives accompany most of the actual rock specimens and sculpted Earth models to help answer these questions.

A banded iron formation from Ontario about 2.7 billion years old records the gradual increase of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere after the appearance of single-cell organisms created photosynthesis. A pair of once-matched, long-estranged sandstone rocks one from Siccar Point, Scotland, and another from Monticello, N.Y. have been reunited, side by side, after being separated when the continents drifted millions of years ago. A scientist from France, apart Jacques Malavieille, has painstakingly created an exhibit featuring layers of colored sand to demonstrate how continental plates collide, forming mountain ranges and ocean troughs. Meanwhile, in the here and now, an "Earth Event Wall" presents live telecasts, video footage and comanimation focusing on current news of such puter geologic and atmospheric dynamics as storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions all over the world.

Nearby, you can see such weird volcanic formations "lava tree" from Hawaii, recently formed when as a flowing lava hardened quickly around a tree into a petrified ice-cream-cone shape. While the Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, named for its major benefactors, David and Ruth Gottesdoesn't stint on its mission to educate in a stimman, ulating way, plenty of features are just plain fun. Jump on a circle on the floor in the earthquake section and your impact will be recorded on a seismograph. Be careful, though: An impact of 6.5 or so might bring down the whole city. And if you sit on one of the benches near the earthquake fault line and the lava tree, you'll experience science by the seat of your pants as recorded sounds of the dynamic Earth vibrate from hidden woofers.

"It's a multimedia, multisensory experience," says Mathez. But the Hall of Planet Earth is just the start of a major new expansion at the museum devoted to the natural sciences. The temporary ground-floor entrance to the hall will be replaced sometime next year, when the Rose Center for Earth and Space Then you'll be able to enter the Hall of Planet opens. Earth from the new planetarium, located just on the other side of the moon. Make that a lunar model the museum hasn't yet mounted an expedition to lasso the actual moon.

I WHEN AND CELEBRATION OF THE OPENING OF THE HALL OF PLANET EARTH. At the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street, 10:30 a.m.-4 p.m. tomorrow. Mock volcano explosion, Dixieland band, street performers and Earth-themed food. such as Sno-cones and Rock Candy.

"Everest," an IMAX film chronicling the 1996 tragedy in which eight climbers died, premieres tomorrow. Mead Film Video Festival presents the "Earth. and the Margaret Wind and Cinema" series today, tomorrow and Sunday. Call 212-769-5200 or 212-769-5305 for film schedules and prices. Admission to museum Open 10 a.m.-8:45 p.m.

Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5:45 p.m. Sundays-Thursdays; for general information, call 212-769-5100..