Dredging in the Danger Island Troughs, which divide the High and Western parts of the Manihiki Plateau, recovered several fresh pebbles of olivine tholeiite and tholeiite, a single pebble of highly altered gabbroic cumulate, and several dozen pebbles of altered variolitic basalt. Troughs suggests that at one time the troughs were the site of active faulting. A tectonic model for the evolution of the plateau, consistent with a fracture zone origin for the Danger Island Troughs, requires the formation of the Manihiki Plateau at a triple junction of the Pacific, Farallon, and Antarctic plates.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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

Supplement to: Clague, David A (1976): Petrology of Basaltic and Gabbroic Rocks Dredged from the Danger Islands Troughs, Manihiki Plateau. In: Schlanger, S.O.; Jackson, E.D.; et al., Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, U.S. Government Printing Office, XXXIII, 891-911