The Natural History Museum's (formerly called, British Museum) ocean bottom deposit collection consists of samples from about 40,000 locations around the world and is the most comprehensive British collection of seabed samples and cores. The most important sub-collection is the Sir John Murray Collection, which includes seabed samples from the HMS Challenger expedition (1872-76) and a large number of samples from other expeditions which were sent to Sir John Murray for examination such as those of the Albatross and the Valdivia. It was given to the Museum by the Murray family in 1921 following his death in 1914 (Kempe, D.R.C. and Buckley, H.A., 1987). These samples were transferred to the British Museum to the exception of those of the Albatross which were sent back to the United States and are now found for their most part at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington. Scientists and collections management specialists can visit the collections of the Natural History Museum in London and borrow specimens for research.

From 1983 until 1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions. At the time it was the most extended data compilation on ferromanganese deposits world wide. Initially published in a proprietary format incompatible with present day standards it was jointly decided by AWI and NOAA to transcribe this legacy data into PANGAEA. This transfer is augmented by a careful checking of the original sources when available and the encoding of ancillary information (sample description, method of analysis...) not present in the NOAA-MMS database.