During a short geological cruise in May 1979 by HMAS Kimbla, two manganese nodules were recovered from the deep sea about 250 nautical miles southeast of Sydney. They were laying on a greenish gray calcareous mud. The manganese nodules are subspherical with a rather irregular and rough surface, and are about 10 em in diameter. They consist of numerous concentric shells, many less than 0.1 mm thick, of brown and black metal oxides, and pale yellowish clay, in roughly equal proportions. The metal contents of the nodules (dried at 105°C) were determined at the Australia Bureau of Mineral Resources, Geology and Geophysics (BMR) using the atomic absorption method for Mn, Ni, Cu and Co, and a volumetric method for Fe.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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.This dataset represents the digitized Table 1, pp. 68, of the related publication.