The manganese crust was retrieved from station 1052 during the 14th cruise of the R/V Dmitry Mendeleev. The station is located in Hess Deep in the axis of the Galapagos Spreading Center, just east of its junction with the East Pacific Rise. It consists of 16 mm of ferromanganese material encrusting fresh basaltic glass (see illustration). Analyses were performed by instrumental neutron activation analysis except for Cu and Ni which were determined by atomic absorption. Microprobe analyses of the underlying glass reveal typical ocean theolitic composition with low alkalis and a SiO2 content of about 50%. They are compared to other published data from the Galapagos Spreading Center, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the flank of the East Pacific Rise.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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. 597 of the related publication.