1 bottom, those fine materials are just like most of the rest of the fine 



2 materials out there, 



3 Whatever is of the right particle size, they are all going to move 



4 into the canyon together and the question is, you know, if the signal is 



5 already getting back down to background, the canyon doesn't have the 



6 ability to reconcentrate the materials other than some of the discussion 



7 we've been having on the scavenging, with some amplification from that. 



8 In general, I don't see how you have, with all of the other fine 



9 materials that are also moving into the canyon off the shelf, I don't 



10 see how you are going to be able to measure very much. 



11 DR. BUTMAN: Let me try to answer John's question in a different 



12 way. If you had one unit of dissolved contaminants ejected into the 



13 water on the surface, some fraction of that is absorbed onto 



14 particulates. Some fraction then gets transported away along with the 



15 ambient flow and some fraction settles to the bottom. 



16 What I am saying is that in the canyon, because of the topographic 



17 constriction of the wall, that fraction which is initially carried away 



18 in open shelf environments with the ambient flow could potentially also 



19 end up in the canyon, and we don't know the distribution between what, 



20 in a completely tranquil environment, what gets carried away and what 



21 comes to the bottom. 



22 I think the reason why--I hypothesize that one of the reasons why 



23 we don't see very many contaminants right around the base of the rig in 



24 all of the existing studies is that much of it has been just diluted and 



25 carried away a long way from the rig along with fine grained sediments 



26 in the upper part of the water, and that may not happen in the canyon. 



27 DR. TEAL: So, let's take that as a scenario and say, then, what 



28 area of the--how big, how much of the upper canyon do you want to 



29 concentrate it in? Let's take a value. I mean, is it a square 



30 kilometer? Is it 5 square kilometers? Surely, we are talking about 



31 something more than a few square meters, but let's just see what the 



32 number turns out to be. 



33 DR. BUTMAN: Take 5 square kilometers and see what the number 



34 turns out to be. 



292 



