Live camera
Grand Canyon live camera — Arizona
Two billion years of rock cut into a canyon. Around sunrise and sunset the walls turn red, and the place looks like somewhere else entirely.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
A gorge cut into a high plateau by the Colorado River. It is around 1,600 metres deep and runs more than 400 kilometres.
The horizontal banding on the cliffs is the rock layers themselves, newest at the top and oldest near the bottom. The lowest rock is about two billion years old, which means a large share of the Earth's history is stacked vertically inside this one frame.
The layers are not quite continuous. Partway down, a boundary known as the Great Unconformity marks about 1.2 billion years of rock that is simply missing from the sequence. The canyon was protected in stages rather than at once: a forest reserve in 1893, a national monument in 1908, and a national park only in 1919.
The canyon is up to 16 kilometres wide, and the distance to the far wall shows up directly as the amount of haze in between.
Arizona does not observe daylight saving, so it stays 16 hours behind Japan all year. The walls redden around sunrise and sunset, which from Japan means late afternoon (pre-dawn there) and late morning (evening there).
Colorado means red, and the name comes from the colour of the river in the days when it carried a great load of silt. Since a dam went in upstream in 1963 the murk has stopped, and what runs through now is cold clear water drawn off the bottom of a reservoir. The sandbars have been cut away and the fish in the river have changed, so floods are now released from the dam on purpose to pile the sand back up.
It is a still camera, so dark hours return a black frame. Even by day, haze pooling in the canyon can hide the far side.
About this camera
| Place | Arizona |
| Format | Still image |
| Time zone | America/Phoenix (UTC-7) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | U.S. National Park Service |
| Terms of use | U.S. government work |
The operator's own page
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.
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