ARA Islas Orcadas left Buenos Aires 09:05 27 October and arrived off Cape Town the evening of 19 December 1976. On the course of the cruise 15 dredges were attempted: six on the Conrad Fracture Zone, eight on the Islas Orcadas Fracture Zone, and one on the crest of the Africa-Antarctica rise near 11 °E. A total of 730 kilograms of rock were recovered.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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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.