Kennecott Copper Corporation became interested in manganese nodules in part based on the publications of Dr. John Mero and work being done at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the 1960s. Through their subsidiary Bear Creek Mining, Kennecott's first exploration campaign dates back as early as 1962, when 10 tons of nodules were dredged from a site west of Baja California. For the next few years, the group relied on technical associations with oceanographic research campaigns. This in particular the case of the Atlantis Cruise 266, June-July 1961 held by the Woods-Hole Oceanographic Institution over the Blake Plateau area. Samples were analysed using Atomic Absorption Spectrometry.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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 2c, pp. 28 of the related publication.