A six-week geological cruise of the West German research vessel Sonne, under the auspices of the Australian-German Science Agreement, has yielded a considerable amount of information about the Exmouth Plateau, the Wallaby Plateau, and the intervening Cuvier Abyssal Plain. The main aim of the cruise was to sample pre-Quaternary strata cropping out on the plateau margins; subsidiary aims were to sample the Quaternary sequence from continental shelf to abyssal plain on two representative profiles, to obtain Quaternary cores for gas analysis, and to search for manganese nodules. All four aims Were successfully accomplished.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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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.