Last month, while the research team was testing its deep-ocean cameras about 4 miles off Havana, they spotted an oddly shaped wreck on the ocean bottom.

Part of the wreckage had been cut off as if by an explosion, said Paulina Zelitsky, president of Advanced Digital Communications, a Canadian company working with USF on the Cuban exploration.

After comparing their find with historical documents, the researchers concluded they had stumbled on the battleship Maine, which was sunk under mysterious circumstances in 1898, touching off the Spanish-American War.

"This could put to rest a century of controversy," said Louis A. Perez Jr., a history professor at the University of North Carolina who wrote War of 1898: The United States and Cuba in History and Historiography.

The researchers will unveil footage of their discovery today at USF's St. Petersburg campus at the College of Marine Sciences. They will talk about that discovery as well as their work to map the geologically complex and largely unknown sea bottom off Cuba.

"They're finding things nobody has ever seen before," said USF marine science professor Frank Muller-Karger, who has worked on the oceanography side of the research project.

High salinity and low temperatures have kept the Maine remarkably well-preserved, according to Zelitsky. That news should make historians happy, Perez said.

"The issue of whether the explosion was from within or without could be resolved once and for all," he said.

Sent to Spanish-ruled Cuba to protect U.S. interests during a simmering insurrection, the battleship was torn apart Feb. 15, 1898, by a massive explosion as it lay at anchor in Havana harbor. Of the 350 men on board, 263 died. The survivors were brought to Tampa.

The American public, bombarded with sensationalistic coverage by William Randolph Hearst's and Joseph Pulitzer's newspapers, blamed Spain. A month later a U.S. Navy court of inquiry ruled that a large mine was responsible. On April 25, Congress declared war on the Spanish.

Troops swarmed into Tampa, where the battle cry was "Remember the Maine!" After what one U.S. official dubbed "a splendid little war," Spain surrendered and the United States found itself a global superpower, with colonies in Cuba and the Philippines.

There still is strong disagreement about what sank the Maine. Cuban schoolchildren are taught that Americans sank their own ship as a pretext for the war. A 1976 board of inquiry led by U.S. Adm. Hyman Rickover labeled the explosion an accident.

But two years ago, National Geographic published an article again raising the possibility that a mine could have done the damage, and that led to a vigorous but inconclusive debate at the U.S. Naval Institute.

Although the Maine sank in Havana's harbor, that's not where it has rested for most of the past century. In 1911, military engineers built a cofferdam around the wreckage and raised the Maine. They towed it to sea, and with a U.S. flag flying on its bow, allowed it to sink again, presumably forever.

Fast forward to the late 1990s, when Zelitsky's company -- after three years of intense negotiations -- persuaded the Cuban government to grant it the exclusive right to explore the largely uncharted ocean bottom around the Communist island.

In about a year of exploration work using the latest in side-scan sonar and remote-controlled robot craft, the research team has discovered new geological faults in the volcanic sea bottom that might have some influence on Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean currents.

Their high-tech equipment also uncovered a number of shipwrecks, including, on Oct. 18, the one they eventually identified as the Maine resting in water about 3,700 feet deep, Zelitsky said.

Because the ship rests in what is considered Cuban territorial waters, the researchers took care to register their find with the National Patrimony, the agency in charge of all of Cuban historical and archaeological finds, she said. But the researchers wanted to make the formal announcement about the finding on U.S. soil because they consider the ship to be American property, she said.

Perez said there might be some argument about that, especially given the precedent of other shipwrecks salvaged for their gold bullion, like the sunken Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha discovered near Key West by the late treasure salvor, Mel Fisher.

"It's like the Spanish galleons," he said. "If they think this is a U.S. ship that belongs to the U.S, then all of Mel Fisher's stuff should go back to Spain."

- Times researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.

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