A variety of manganese nodules from the Pacific Ocean were selected from dredge performed during various ship cruises of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO. For Mn and Fe the analyses were made using wet chemical techniques by the U.S. Bureau of Mines The analyses of all the other elemnts were made by an X-ray fluorescence technique following a drying of the samples at 200°C. The metal concentrations are presented reduced to a detrital mineral free basis. SiO2, Al2O3, and H2O were considered as detrital parts. Reduced percents are used to allow better definition of the compositional regions.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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 2B, pp. 762 of the related publication.