Whatever else we can say about this now drawing to a close. Just from the u.n. World Meteorological Association. That make this the warmest decade since record keeping began in the mid 19th century in the past 5 years since 2015 the hottest on record temperature of 38.7 degrees south. Of the Cambridge tonic garden never taken in the u.k. Was warming like this come floods and a promising new technique being tried out in Scotland suggests substantial and sudden flooding flash flood might be for a cost in the future. Well as we've been hearing 2 British women are among the 30 people injured by a volcanic eruption on quite a island off the coast of New Zealand 5 people are believed to be dead and another 8 unaccounted for this is what Stuart Coburn from the local ambulance service told reporters. Majority of the injuries blastoff injuries. A number of us prices for critical and I've recorded very intensive care at the hospital and then with transported a number of patients to the hospitals and he still was believed the other victims were from a strain of the United States China and Malaysia and this is what Prime Minister Scott Morrison said it has been a very difficult day I have been speaking with Prime Minister returned and the news we feed would be very difficult and it is proving to be sorrow. Is to die there with 24 stridency enjoying a wonderful cruise. In New Zealand taking in those sots together enjoying life a peaceful time of the 24 strides we've been awful to as a tiny I've annoyed and this morning that 13 of those strident hospitalized across multiple hospitals in New Zealand. There are 11 a strike that is still unaccounted for. And that we fear of the 5 a deceased persons that 3 of those up to 3. Are strides but that is not yet confirmed Well that was Scott Morrison joining us now from Radio New Zealand as Colin Peacock a local and. Well very hard day for everybody it's been almost exactly 24 hours since the volcano erupted How was the the Sachin rescue proceeding. Well fairly slowly as we heard yesterday even some hours after the eruption in the 1st arrival back of people who'd been rescued from the island and the distribution of victims to hospitals around the North Island were some frustration that the police were saying the island was still too dangerous to talk so can pass too hot for police and rescue us to visit so darkness fell some 7 or 8 hours later and no one had been able to go to the island today the police were able to get vessels close to there to launch drones and helicopters and other aircraft to have a look we believe at least one or 2 police officers here and search and rescue people have been able to see it for and have a look around but the message that's been coming back is the same as it was yesterday late yesterday before it got completely dark and it was no signs of life at all so we're kind of stuck with those casualties figures and in people now trying to make sure that the survivors and the victims have the best chance in the hospitals where they've been distributed amongst them Boone's units around the country to make sure they get the best care where where the survivors actually taken from how much do we need nor know about what happened. Well there are 2 groups travel by boat on one of the main 2 a companies who apparently offer operate 3 boats so one boat load had been up in. The one the 1st group of tourists were the ones that were captured on the webcam writing on the island as being very close to the crisis like when the eruption happened the 1st group in fact had already completed their tour and were down at the boat ramp so they were the ones who were able to rescue a few people bring them back and then make a return journey some helicopter pilots from the volcanic air service in the way spec rescue helicopter that's the one that does a lot of the medical evacuations to and from hospitals they sprang into action and were able to risk you some people as well so the 1st boat that came in yesterday was apparently came in quite quite sedately and the evacuation was orderly The 2nd one with I think the badly injured people arrived at pace in covered in ash so that was obviously more more dramatic So at the moment they've distributed the victims among hospital from little more and all cleaned for the down to the Heart Hospital which is close to the south of the North Island quite a distance away to make sure that they get the best of care and albeit Boone's units in the specialist treatment that's available there. And how did they actually proceed with it was it a huge eruption at the beginning or did it build up. No it was a said to be spared and almost instantaneous it was described by the specialist as a throat clearing outburst from from the mountain So initially they experts said this is likely to be followed by a period of query since so they weren't initially worried about a bet repeat or eruptions or intensification of it but since then they've analyzed some of the data and they do say there's a $5050.00 chance the g.n.a.s. a Vulcan all a jackal service a $5050.00 chance of a further eruption within 24 hours though whether that's a strong as the one we saw yesterday or not we don't know and in fact the experts have been a pains to stress that this wasn't a large eruption on the scale of things an effect on their $1.00 to $5.00 scale they rated at a 4 with 5 being the top and the ash fall pretty much confined to over the island itself and the surrounding sea and it's about 48 to 50 kilometers to the nearest point on shore and although they initially issued warnings to people to stay away from the shore and beware of of ash fall since a look at that seems to be contained over the island itself. But the questions now being asked about absolute is an activity over recent weeks and specifically on the 18th of November where the alert was raised from one to 2 and one of the 2 a company's bacon June appointed extra tour guides to operate his kind of forward scouts that would send them out before taking the tour groups out just to look for signs of anything or any extra activity at the crater lake So questions are now being asked about whether really given an upsurge of volcanic activity the tourist should have been going on at all and all this the prime minister says will be looked at in time and a full inquiry. And are there other volcanoes where we know it's on the ring of fire caught on but are there other volcanoes that are as active as this one while there are and they haven't been any major eruption that have activated the National Emergency Management System but just as recently as 996 Mt were Pay Who which is a major tourist location one of 3 of those big volcanic cones in the central North Island not too far away from the Bay of Plenty where White Island are situated off the shore there was a serious eruption back in 1906 some people were injured there and after that they had to build new channels to take lava and what they called the flows off the mountain and make sure they went away from safety in the ski fields on the same tour of populations there so it's certainly as you say on the ring of fire it's an ever present danger the serious major eruptions though a so rare that I guess it was considered safe risky or. An acceptable risk to run tourism to White Island so all that's going to be looked at in this inquiry and just to keep people on their toes there's been a 5.3 earthquake just south of good has been which again not too far away on the East Cape of north of the North Island about $22.00 and a half hours ago now the experts a genius say that it's not related but it certainly hasn't done anything to soothe the news of people in that part of the country. Many many thanks. Rob Well we heard Cullen say there that the level was raised in the middle of November and we can hear more about how these things are managed from Dr Janine Krypto Who's of all can all just on the line from Washington hello Dr Crippen are. Hello how you very good now you you've obviously studied some of New Zealand's volcanoes Come on said that the level was raised in the middle of November what would have been the reason for that yes sir genius uses a different technology is a fine to pick method to actually study the volcanoes and look for changes and activity. One or more stores are showing an increase in activity they'll pay more attention and being a little can be raised in the Kate that activity is above normal levels so that's what happened here so and in this case that they raised they raise the alert level this is not like some talons which for weeks before. Being studied back in 1980 and in the state of Washington was being studied as a place where there was quite likely going to be a major volcanic eruption. Correctness is very very different and that was Mount St Helens there was a lot of. Information telling the vulcanologist at the time that magma was making its way towards the surface and that's not the case yet this was a very different from other options much much smaller. Very very different the warning signs are different and just started right now yeah a different scenario this is much smaller the activity would be much lower. Under Sonisphere. Could still I mean it shot up in the 12000 feet and you know cause catastrophic injuries to the people who were on the rim of the volcano. This is where it gets you know it just and then just doesn't it because you say well how come your way are climbing up the rim of the volcano when the thing erupted but but this isn't it's not restricted to New Zealand you know people going for a good close look at a volcano Oh absolutely not and you know it doesn't take us a corruption to be catastrophic and you can have lodger options but don't impact people so it really depends on what people are and are infrastructure and the way and when what health products of the option but we live around Ok is all around the world there are over 800000000 people living within 100 kilometers of O'Kane is around the world there are a lot of benefit is tourism as we see here agriculture there beautiful places and live off of resources so there are many many positives the bulking are but every now and again we get surprised by eruptions like the more options that have been and the impacts that just heartbreaking. Yes Would there have been any warning in the the half an hour before the eruption to place with been any rumblings writing of that sort. I don't know what genius I'm sure will be analyzing everything very very closely but that'll be a question for them once it had a chance to look back and in in a case like that it's perfectly well I wouldn't say normal but it's it's understood that a volcano can just go off that it doesn't have to make any kind of initial shuddering or anything. Has a rupture that I've driven by a magnet rising to the center there are a lot more one I'm. Around her friends by being in that building crusher under a volcano. At the magma pushing its way through the rock every finger and causing some of the lookout for seem driven eruptions that Christianity quietly building until it breaks reaches a breaking point. And would this volcano have been a well studied recession literary genius and research of the New Zealand have done a great job working on the cocaine or understanding it and monitoring it and this goes to show us that even with the best finance and the well wanted a volcano that surprises you still happen. Dr Janine Crippen thank you very much for talking to us thank you well you may have heard the term supermassive black holes. New findings seem to say that super massive black holes in space may not be as massive as one once thought a group of astronomers think that the way we measure them is wrong. That they could be more powerful Well let's find out what Professor Condra who is an astronomer at mit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can tell us Hello Professor Carol hi right thanks for having me on the show good good to have you with us. Supermassive black holes mean what distinguishes a super massive black hole the way that people think about it conventionally That's right yes so they're kind of 2 classes of black holes as we know of them in the universe there are what we call stellar mass black holes these are the black to the small black holes that that are produced through a supernova explosion when a massive star explodes and collapses into a black hole just to do its own the strong gravity of this you know the massive previously massive star and that produces a black hole that's maybe $10.00 to $20.00 times the mass of the sun something around that order of magnitude but then on the other side of the spectrum there are these huge black holes that we call super massive black holes that said as a center is of most if not all galaxies and they range in mass from around a 1000000 times the mass of the sun to a 1000000000 or even $10000000000.00 times the mass of the sun that's a huge difference of scale listen to the mean even if you're just doing zeros or to the power of it it's a big big difference Absolutely yeah it's a it's a huge question in astrophysics right now how do you grow a super massive black hole in the 1st place if the only way that we really know how to make a black hole is through this supernova explosion in the collapse of a massive star how do you go from something that's 10 times the mass of the sun to 10000000000 times the mass of the sun and we don't really understand the details behind that and then the other question is why don't we see any intermediate masses between that that those 2 huge ranges these are big low pressure. Why isn't there a current of middle sized barriers were. When you you talked about them being the center of every almost every galaxy if we got one of the middle of Argo except we do it's called Sagittarius a star and it's because it's close you know when he looked towards the Constellation and said to Terry s. That's the set towards the center of our galaxy and that black hole is $4000000.00 times the mass of the sun. Foreboding. And they have a different I mean because they're so strong they have different characteristics to regular black holes actually what's interesting is that the stellar mass black holes behave in in very similar ways to the super massive black holes and in that sometimes we see them. Feeding on a lot of material and like in the case of a super massive black hole that's hot gas from the surrounding galaxy and in the case of a stellar mass black hole sometimes you see stellar mass black holes that get into a binary system with a normal star like our sun and it can pull off to real from that star over time but what's interesting is that in both of these cases the stellar mass black hole with you know binary system and the super massive black hole in sitting at the center of a galaxy they both have form what we call accretion disks of material that's kind of swirling towards the center of the black hole and and they behave in actually very similar ways surprisingly similar ways just an on extremely different sized scales. Let me ask about this new way of measuring or winning a super massive black hole can you explain it in layman's terms. Yeah so this is one this is a problem or something that's very challenging for astronomers is to to measure the mass of a black hole now the the mass of of the black hole at the center of our galaxy Sagittarius a star is actually very early well measured because we have telescopes because because that black hole is just so close to us. And we can actually resolve the trajectories of individual stars near the center of our galaxy and we can map out how they're moving around. Some you know dark object and because we can map out the trajectory and the velocity of those stars then we can infer what the mass of our black hole at the center of our galaxy is and it gets a little bit harder when you talk about the super massive black holes that other galaxies because it's there too far away you can't resolve the trajectories of individual stars but we use the bulk motions of stars at the centers of galaxies to kind of try and infer the masses of the central black hole. It's like looking at a footprint to try to figure out what size of a passion made that footprint Exactly yeah so will this mean that the size of these super massive black holes is revised downwards is that something that you're now seeing So one of the interesting things that this. That this paper is is taking on is you know the the. The best ways that we have for measuring the masses of black holes is when those black holes have lots of material. Accreting on to the black hole when when there's lots of material getting close to the black hole then we have the best chance of measuring the mass of that black hole but most black holes in the universe don't have a lot of material accreting on to them about 90 percent of the black holes that we see don't have a lot of that material and so it's harder to measure the masses of those galaxies. And what this paper is suggesting is that they've they've. Proposed a new technique for measuring the masses of these. What we call quiescent galaxies this 90 percent of galaxies of black holes that don't have a lot of material around them and what their study suggests is that those that you know from this new analysis is that the that the super massive black hole holes are are less massive than than what we previously thought I would say though that when we study individual black holes and these ones that have lots of material around them. They. It's isn't look like there's anything necessarily wrong with how we've been measuring black holes in the past but this new technique is is trying to go beyond looking at individual black hole masses and is trying to say something about the population of all super massive black holes regardless of whether or not they're you know feeding on a lot of material Well I think you very much for you know making such a great effort to make it make sense to us we really appreciate it thank you for having me on the show thank you for it but I sales of what are variously called for by force or sports utility vehicles no outnumber electric vehicle sales a rate of $37.00 to $1.00 the government's u.k. Energy Research Center says that this is threatening attempts to reduce carbon emissions S.U.V.s accounted for 21 percent of new car sales last year in the u.k. Professor Julian Annabelle is from the center behind the research hello So here is I beg pardon here is Professor Gillian Annabelle. Well there's quite a few reasons why this is happening and it's quite easy to sort of blame the consumers though it's sort of bad bad taste in and not caring about the planet but in actual fact the choice of these vehicles on the market is huge it's been rising the way in which they've been marketed has been really quite aggressive motor manufacturers have been found to only spend about 4 percent of their advertising revenue on showing us the electric vehicle a we have a card and an environment so a lot of people think they need a car b. These cars are very attractive see the finance deals that are offered actually don't really disclose the benefits of getting a less energy intensive vehicle they don't show you the running costs they really just showing you the monthly repayments they're wrapping up the government taxing those prepayments the annual circulation tax so people aren't getting the carbon signals so what we've been doing is really focusing on the uptake of electric vehicles and really focusing on you know what proportion the market are we up to and for pure battery electric vehicles are still one percent of car sales at the moment so it's tiny and we've kind of. Turned off face away from the other end of the market where this phenomenon is happening of this uptake of large vehicles so we set