Thomas Brown, age 11, of High Point, North Carolina, for his question:

Did Atlantis really exist?

Scholars have been arguing about this for 2,000 years. Now at last the age old question may be answered. Based on some recent evidence, many scholars agree that Atlantis almost certainly existed. It now seems that Atlantis was less ancient, less remote    and far more important to the history of civilization than anyone imagined.

The Greek philosopher Plato told the story of Atlantis in great detail. He described it as an ideal society that declined into a corrupt military state and tried to enslave the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Then suddenly the ocean island of Atlantis sank into the sea. According to Plato, this all happened 11,000 years ago, somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules, which would have been out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Many people searched for evidence to back up Plato's story    and found nothing. Meantime, other scholars were searching the ruins of early peoples that flourished around the eastern Mediterranean between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago. They traced the civilizations of Greece and ancient Egypt back to still earlier peoples. One of these was the mysterious Minoan peoples, who left evidence of a once splendid civilization on Crete, in Greece and on a few Aegean islands. Until very recently, nobody associated the Minoans with lost Atlantis.

Then certain scholars suggested that the Atlantis story makes more sense if placed in a different time and place, in about 1500 B.C. in the Eastern Mediterranean. Meantime, oceanographers had found proof that a catastrophic volcanic eruption had occurred in this region    in 1450 B.C.

If the revised estimates are correct, the place to look is among a group of small volcanic islands between Crete and Greece. Certainly the evidence proves that this region was buried and most likely swamped by a disaster three times greater than the devastating explosion of Krakatoa, which happened in 1883.

The early Mediterranean civilizations were great sailors and traders, always swapping and exchanging their ideas and their creations. If Atlantis once thrived in these parts, evidence would be left in other ancient Aegean cities    just where we find traces of the mysterious Minoan civilization that also disappeared suddenly.

Certain scholars now think that the Minoan and Atlantis civilizations were one and the same. The story, they say, is of great importance be¬cause our civilization sprang from that of ancient Greece    which arose from the Minoans, who may have originated in Atlantis.

Geologists point to the small island of Thera as near the center of the eruption of 1450 B.C. There, buried below volcanic debris, archeolo¬gists have found artistic murals and other evidence of the brilliant civilization that could have been Atlantis.