The American Deep Sea Drilling Project (JOIDES) has agreed to drill several holes into the deep sea sediments at sites in the NE Atlantic suggested by UK and French scientists. These sites have been chosen on the basis of data collected over several years in the areas of Rockall, the Bay of Biscay and King's Trough. On Cruise 33 we undertook to make more detailed seismic reflection surveys of three of these sites in order to guide the choice of the exact hole position and to provide supplementary data. The following three sites were surveyed: Site A in the Hatton-Rockall Basin, Site B in Rockall Trough, Site C on the Azores-Biscay Rise. (2) The southeast end of King's Trough (Peake and Freen Deeps) was studied in detail in Cruises 4 and 11 of R. R. S. 'Discovery' in 1965 and 1966. The results of this work (Matthews et al. , 1969) were not conclusive about the origin of King's Trough. The major part of Cruise 33 was concerned, therefore, with obtaining more geological and geophysical data about King's Trough and its relationship to sea floor spreading occurring to the west on the mid-Atlantic Ridge.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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