The northwestern Pacific Ocean is the largest expanse of old oceanic lithosphere, and so the principal theme of Leg 32 set by the Pacific Advisory Panel was the late Mesozoic history of the Pacific Ocean. The main scientific goals originally set for the leg were to: 1) Determine the development of the very deep sea floor of the western Pacific, including the nature of its basement rocks and the age, lithology, and fossil content of the sedimentary rocks overlying acoustic basement. 2) Establish standard mid-Mesozoic to Recent paleontological-biostratigraphic reference sections for the (present-day) northwest Pacific. 3) Determine the paleolatitude for a specific period of volcanicity on Koko Guyot of the Emperor Seamount Chain.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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: Larson, Roger L; Moberly, Ralph; Bukry, David; Foreman, H P; Gardner, James V; Keene, John B; Lancelot, Yves; Luterbacher, Hanspeter; Marshall, M C; Matter, A (1975): Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project. U. S. Government Printing Office, XXXII, 980 pp