Reply #4: I know about the "scientific study of the flow rate"

[protocol rv]

And it sounds not so scientific. When I was in school in the USA, we called that a wild arse guess. I bet BP will slowly allow more oil to enter that siphon they installed, and as it warms up they'll take more and more oil (the oil column being lighter than the water column, a lot of it should go into the siphon). So by next week we will have a surface measurement of the siphoned rates, and they will have cameras to measure what's leaking. This should pin it down.