The continental edge of eastern North America is the passive margin with the oldest geological history available in the modern oceans. Rifting and seafloor spreading between the North American and African continents began in the late Triassic to Early Jurassic. A possible spreading-center jump and reorganization in spreading at the time of the Blake Spur Magnetic Anomaly (?Bathonian ) left some of the oldest crust on the western margin of the North Atlantic. Penetration and sampling of such old ocean crust and the immediately overlying pelagic sedimentary cover, consisting of Middle Jurassic and younger strata, has long been a key objective in oceanographic research. This objective was accomplished at Site 534.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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.