Ice Palace. On the b.b.c. Sounds. Good. On am f.m. Or in the u.k. On digital and on like a mirage on up all night whatever else we can say about the tech in the snow drawing to a close it's certainly been a hot one just out from the u.n. World Meteorological Association preliminary data 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 Celsius she caught it in late July at the Cambridge but tonic garden never taken in the u.k. Was warming like this come floods and a promising new technique being tried out in Scotland suggest are substantial and sudden flooding flash flooding might be for const in the future. Where 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 are unaccounted for this is what Stuart Coburn from the local ambulance service told reporters earlier majority the injuries blastoff injuries and bends the numbers last crisis were critical for cawed very intensive care at the hospital and then with transported a number of patients to other hospitals around his health it was believed the other victims were from Australia the United States China and Malaysia and this is what Prime Minister Scott Morrison said has been a very difficult day I have. But in speaking with Prime Minister. And the news we feed would be very difficult and it is proving to be. Yes 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 tie and I've been naughty and this morning that 13 of those a stridency hospitalized across multiple hospitals in New Zealand. There are 11 a strides that are still unaccounted for and that we feel 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 has called him peacock a local and. Well. Hard day for everybody that's been there almost exactly 24 since the volcano erupted. The South. 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 up north island were some frustration that the police were saying they were still too dangerous to talk that can pass too hot for police and rescuers 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 that and launch drones and helicopters and other aircraft to have a look we believe at least one or 2 police officers and search and rescue people have been able to set foot 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 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 to eat nor know about what happened with the 2 groups the travel by boat on one of the main 2 a companies who apparently offer operates 3 boats so one boat load had been up in. The 1st group of tourists were the ones that were captured on the web cam writing on the island as being very close to the Crighton like when the eruption happened the 1st group in fact had already completed their 2 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 West picked rescue helicopter that the one that does a lot of the medical evacuations to and from hospitals they spring into action and were able to rescue some people as well so the 1st boat that came in yesterday was 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 an Oakland further 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. It was 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 that repeat. Eruptions or an 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 that 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 and in fact only $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 be aware of of ash fall they've since said 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 seen 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 tours 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 there are other other volcanoes where we know it's on the Ring of Fire column 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 grew up a 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 in the same sort 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 the North Island about 2 and a half hours ago now the experts genius say that it's not related but it certainly hasn't done anything to soothe the nudes of people in that part of the country calling anybody Thanks. For what we heard Colleen say their. Level was raised in the middle of November and we can hear more about how these things are managed from Dr Janine crippler Who's of all can all just on the line from Washington hello Dr Crippen are. I love how you very good now you've you've obviously studied some of New Zealand's a volcano's Cullen said that the level was raised in the Bengal of November what would have been the reason for that yes sir genius uses different technology as a scientific method to actually study the volcanoes and look for changes and activity. One or more there is a showing an increase in activity they'll pay more attention and being a little it can be raised in the case that the activity is a boat small boat little so that what happened. So in in this case then they raised they raise the alert level this is not like rides and Helen says which for weeks or we're being studied Does the back in 1080 in in the state of Washington were being studied as a place where there was quite likely going to be a major volcanic eruption. Correct this is very very different with Mt St Helens there was a lot of. Information telling the vulcanologist at the time that magma was making its way toward the surface and that's not the case yet this was a very different options much much smaller. Very very different the warning signs are different and. Just starting. Different scenarios this is much smaller the activity would be much larger. 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 against and then just doesn't it because you say well how come you where are climbing up the rim of the volcano when the thing erupted but this isn't is not restricted to New Zealand you know people going for a good close look at a volcano Oh absolutely not you know it doesn't take a bigger option to be catastrophic and you can have larger options but don't impact people so it really depends on what people and our infrastructure are in the way. With health products. But we live around Ok as all around the world there are 800000000 people but they within a 100 kilometers of bulkiness around the world there are a lot of benefit there is tourism as we see here these agricultural they're beautiful places to live off of resources so there are many many positives the bulk you know but every now and again we get surprised by. More options that happen and the impacts that just. Yeah. Would there have been any warning in the the half an hour before the eruption took place with the bed any odd rumblings or anything of that sort. I don't know the genius I'm sure to be analyzing everything very very closely by that will be a question for them what they've had a chance to look back. And in in a case like that it's it's perfectly. Well I wouldn't say normal but it's understood that a volcano can just go off except it doesn't have to make any kind of initial shuddering or anything you please of options that are driven by magma rising to the spent a lot more one. Where the higher the Russians are driven by him or her building crush or undergo corner of her heart the magma pushing its way through the rock really finger uncorking normally look out for any steam driven eruption that appreciatively quietly building until it breaks reaches a breaking point. And would this volcano have been very well studied if absolutely genius and researchers in New Zealand take on a great job working on a popular understanding and monitoring it and this goes to show us that even with the best suntan and the well wanted it is Ok now is that surprises you still have. When the Dr Janine crippler thank you very much for talking to us thank you. Well you may have heard the term super massive black hole and new findings seem to say that super massive black holes in space may not be as massive as were once thought a group of a sauna Marse think that the way we measure them is wrong and that they could be more powerful Well let's find out what Professor Aron Kyra who is an astronomer at mit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can tell us Hello Professor Carr hi right thanks for having me on the show good good to have you with us. Supermassive black holes mean what distinguishes a supermassive black hole the way that people think about it conventionally. That's right yes so there are kind of 2 classes of black holes as we know of them in the universe there are the 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 to studio it's 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 sitters 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 00 to the power of it it's a big big difference absolutely 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 and 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. Of middle sized barriers were. When you talked about them being the center of every almost every galaxy if we got one of the middle of Ergo except. We do it's called Sagittarius a star and it's because it's close you know when you look towards the constellation Sagittarius that's the set towards the center of our galaxy and that black hole is $4000000.00 times the mass of the sun. 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. From that star over time but what's interesting is that in both of these cases the stellar mass black hole with a 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 Yes that's right 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 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 that i sales of what are variously called for by force or sports utility vehicles not number 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 Hon 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 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 most 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 be these cars are very attractive say the finance deals 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 religious showing you the monthly repayments they're wrapping up the government tax in 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 our face away from the other end of the market where this phenomenon is happ