Live camera
Mount Aniakchak live camera — Alaska
An ice-free caldera 10 km across and up to 1 km deep, still whole. The rim walls it in so completely that the inside can have its own weather.
Sample September 2026What you are looking at
A volcano in Alaska whose caldera — 10 kilometres across and one kilometre deep — survives whole and free of ice.
The hole was formed about 3,400 years ago when the summit collapsed. The rim stands high all around it, so the inside has weather of its own and cloud can pool in the bowl alone. There is a lake on the floor, and its water escapes through a single breach in the wall to become a river. The last eruption was in 1931. It lies deep in the Alaska Peninsula with no road to it, and is among the least visited places the National Park Service administers. The climate is close to the Aleutians', with a lot of cloud, so days when the rim's outline comes out clearly are limited.
The lake on the floor is called Surprise Lake, and warm springs feed into it. The river that leaves through the breach is a designated Wild and Scenic River, and sockeye salmon run up it all the way into the lake inside the caldera. There is, in other words, a route a fish can take from the sea to the floor of a volcano, and that is what the one gap in the wall amounts to. Cinder cones stand on the caldera floor, so from the rim it looks like a mountain inside a hole.
Alaska time, seventeen to eighteen hours behind Japan; around five in the morning in Japan is local midday. As a still image, nothing shows in the dark hours.
About this camera
| Place | Alaska |
| Format | Still image |
| Time zone | America/Anchorage (UTC-9, DST UTC-8) |
| Category | Volcano |
| Operator | Alaska Volcano Observatory |
| Terms of use | Free to use with credit |
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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