Leg 94 represents the last of four transects of sites set up by the Ocean Paleoenvironment Panel to examine climatic and oceanographic changes in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. During this leg, a transect of six holes aligned roughly in a south-southwest/north-northeast direction were drilled in the North Atlantic from 37° to 53°N. The principal objective of this transect was to document the magnitude and spectral character of the surface-ocean response to high-latitude climatic change in the northern hemisphere during the Neogene.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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