The general objectives of this cruise were to use the newly developed HPC to recover two undisturbed, continuous records of the late Neogene and Quaternary, one from the western Caribbean and the other from the eastern equatorial Pacific, and to test the coring capabilities of the HPC. At site 502 in the Caribbean an hemipelagic facies with accumulation rates of about 3 cm/k.y near site 154 were a coarse-grained volcanogenic turbidite sequence had been recovered at a depth equivalent to a strong seismic reflector. Site 503 was located as close as possible to previously rotary-drilled Site 83 in the eastern equatorial Pacific.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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