Unlike many cruises of the Deep Sea Drilling Project, Leg 48 was scientifically planned to drill a number of sites to systematically address the problems of passive margin evolution. Site 400 was drilled at the foot of the Meriadzek Escarpment of North Biscay in 4399 meters depth. The site was located in a half-graben forming part of a succession of tilted and rotated fault blocks near the continent/ocean boundary. Site 401 was situated on the planated edge of a tilted fault-block underlying the southern edge of the Meriadzek Terrace on the north Biscay margin. Site 402 was located on the upper slope of the northern continental margin of the Bay of Biscay. The main objectives were to establish the presence or absence of shallow water Upper Cretaceous beds, and to penetrate pre-Aptian synrift sediments and the upslope equivalent of the deep water Albian-Aptian carbonaceous mudstones penetrated at Hole 400A.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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: Montadert, Lucien; Roberts, David G; Auffret, Gérard A; Bock, W D; Dupeuble, P A; Hailwood, Ernie A; Harrison, William E; Kagami, H; Lumsden, D N; Müller, C M; Schnitker, Detmar; Thompson, T L; Timofeev, Pyotr P (1979): Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. U. S. Government Printing Office, XLVIII, 1183 pp