Eighteen stations were occupied; 13 dredge hauls were collected on seamount, atoll, and island flanks and three box cores were taken from the sediment cap of an unnamed seamount in the north Marshall Islands. Every dredge haul recovered ferromanganese-oxide crusts, agreeing with the inferences of Halbach and Feller (1980) that crusts form on every hard substrate where currents or other factors preclude significant sedimentation. These samples can be viewed and studied at the U.S. Geological Survey offices in Menlo Park, California.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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. 3 of Schwab, WC et al. (1984) and Appendix A - pp. 1-61 of Manheim, FT & Lane-Bostwick, CM (1989).