The objective of this paper is to show how well known the structure is for a particular uranium deposit. After presenting the average vertical variogram for all the holes, some of the individual variograms will be studied and we will show the influence of a few very rich holes on the overall variogram. This turns out to be poorly defined. The first order variogram, which also has been considered, is curiously similar to the usual variogram, whereas the structure of the translated logarithm proves to be better known. <...>

Giant (and super-giant) metallic deposits are defined as those that store the trace metal (and some major metal like Fe, Al) equivalent in 1011 (1012) tons of continental crust in Clarke (mean crust content) concentration. Deposits of metallic ores that have very contrasting Clarke values (like Fe, Cu and Au) can be compared on geochemical basis, with political-economic and technologic factors minimized. Under these terms, there are now 1171 giant and 137 supergiant accumulations of 37 metals worldwide, contained in 915 deposits, as several deposits have two or more giant metal accumulations (Olympic Dam has 5).

As explained in Preface, this book is a selfcontained member of a broader knowledge system on the world's mineral deposits and their settings I have been developing and experimenting with for more than 40 years. It is a product of global firsthand information gathering in the field and "data mining" from the literature, followed by sorting and organization into interrelated sets searchable and accessible by the rapidly evolving techniques of modern information technology.

The giant outer planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune (Figure 1.1)—are by far the largest planetary bodies in the solar system and together comprise 99.56% of the planetary mass. Although very far from the Earth, the enormous physical size of Jupiter and Saturn meant that these planets were easily visible to the ancients. However, the other two “giants”, Uranus and Neptune, are significantly smaller and so much farther from the Earth that they were unknown before the advent of telescopes, although Uranus is in fact just visible to the naked eye. Uranus was discovered by accident in 1781 by William Herschel (1738-1822) (later Sir William Herschel). Perturbations in the observed orbit of Uranus led John Couch Adams (1819-1892) and Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1811-1877) to independently predict the presence of a further planet, and Neptune was subsequently discovered close to its predicted position by Johann Gottfried Galle (1812-1910) in 1846. The mean observable properties of the outer planets are listed in Table 1.1. <...>