Between January 3 and February 15, 1979, geoscientific investigations off Northwest Australia (Exmouth Plateau, Cuvier Abyssal Plain, Wallaby Plateau) were carried out on SONNE cruises SO-8A and SO-8B by the Bundesanstalt fur Geowissenschaften (BGR, Hannover) in cooperation with the Bureau of Mineral Resources (BMR, Canberra).The major objective of this cruise was the investigation of the geology and structure of the outer West Australian continental margin between 16° and 26° S. An additional objective of the SO-8 cruise included the sampling of manganese crusts and nodules on the plateaus and the adjacent abyssal plains.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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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.