The cruise 9 of the R/V Valdivia was held from the 11 August 1974 to the 5 December 1974 as a survey expedition of the manganese nodule fields situated in the Pacific Ocean between the Clarion and Clipperton fracture zones. It was part of international effort coordinated by the International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE) of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). The stations details were stored in the SIO Ferromanganese Nodule - IDOE Portion ( http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/docucomp/page?xml=NOAA/NESDIS/NGDC/MGG/Geology/iso/xml/G00250.xml&view=getDataView&header=none)

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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