Samples were collected in the South Tasman Sea basin during the Cruise 36 the USNS Eltanin, Cruise 36. The manganese oxide deposit, either manganese crust on manganese nodule was scraped off its ubstrate. In the case of Mn nodules great care was taken not to incorporate the nodule nucleus into the sample. The resultant powders were then analyzed by atomic absorption spectrophotometry.

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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, p. 79 of the related publication.