During the TRANSINDIK (VA07) campaign of the R/V Valdivia in the Central Indian Ocean manganese nodules were retrieved and analysed for their metal composition at Preuss-AG (PREUSSAG) by H. Bäcker. The campaign was conducted from 14 December 1973 until 23 January 1974, between Beira (Mozambique) and Singapore via Port Louis (Mauritius). This geochemical data was not published in the literature and transfered at a later stage into Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) manganese nodule analysis file compiled under the direction of Jane Frazer and Mary Fisk. In this dataset, manganese nodules from the Pacific and the Indian oceans were analyzed at Preuss-AG by Atomic absorption spectrophotometry (AAS)

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1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions.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