"Take another look. It says nothing about "UNIFORM" distribution of elements."
"The abundance of elements in Earth's crust is shown in tabulated form with the estimated crustal abundance for each chemical element shown as either percentage or parts per million (ppm) by mass (10,000 ppm = 1%).".
In fact, if you total up the Parts Per Million column from the various scholarly scientific efforts (as I have), you will find that they all come in fairly close to One Million.
The data you cited expresses the commonality of elements as if they were distributed uniformly throughout the Earths Crust - One million grams of Crust would, if the elements were distributed uniformly, yield X grams of A, Y grams of B, and so forth.
I don't see how you could interpret it any other way, unless doing so would hurt the sales pitch.
So, the take-away is that the ACTUAL presence or absence of an element in some specific location may be highly anomalous in relation to the expected "background" level. We don't know what the "Expected" concentration is other than a scientifically estimated 'Global Average'. Outside of batting baseballs and gambling, averages are not terribly meaningful.
NR 122 extract:
"2. A surprising presence of rare earth elements (REE) has been defined over a large area. This was completely unexpected and justifies further study. The REEs we assayed for are among the 17 REEs now known, are strongly anomalous, and are scandium, yttrium, lanthanum, and cerium. The other 13 known REEs were not included in our assay process. In due course we will re-assay the samples for these additional REEs. Rare earth elements are critical to various civilian and military hardware and are commercially important. (Wikipedia: “Rare Earth Elements“)
3.The REEs are clearly related to a satellite image anomaly as well as geochemical anomalies of: iron, uranium, thorium, copper, silver, gold, lead, zinc, nickel, gallium, mercury, potassium, manganese and molybdenum. These elements are commonly associated with REE occurrences. This anomaly covers almost 9 square miles.
4. We are not sure of the meaning of the presence of these Rare Earth Elements (REEs) but the association of the elements named in 3 above justifies further studies.
5. We do not believe the REEs are part of the porphyry system because they are separated in a different area for the most part."
I would surmise that what was "surprising" was the magnitude of deviation from the 'expected' result, but I'm not peddling a particular narrative, and will have to wait for (if) assay numbers to have a fact-based discussion.
I would demand that ACME refund - or is that the other guy?
