The Atlantic Advisory Panel proposed that Site 8 should be drilled on the rise between the Hatteras and Sohm Abyssal Plains (lat 35° 2l'N., long 67° 3l'W.) This location was considered to offer the best opportunity for realizing two primary objectives. The first of these objectives was to sample and date the oldest available rock in a region adjacent to the North American continent and as far as possible from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The second objective relates to the potential paleobiological and paleoecological information that could be derived from the sedimentary column in this general area.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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