Live camera
Lake Shikotsu and the surrounding peaks live camera
A lake deep enough that it barely freezes. Ringed by Mount Eniwa and Mount Fuppushi, and known for how clear the water is.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
A deep lake that barely freezes even in winter, with the mountains around it. Ringed by Eniwadake and Fuppushidake, it is known for the clarity of its water.
It does not freeze simply because it is warm. The lake fills a volcanic basin, is extremely deep, and holds a great volume of water. Even as the surface cools, water keeps exchanging from below, so the temperature never drops far enough for the whole of it to freeze. That depth is why a lake in Hokkaido stays open. It is roughly 360 metres deep, second in Japan only to Lake Tazawa.
The hollow was formed by a very large eruption around forty thousand years ago. The pyroclastic flow ran tens of kilometres and set hard into the rock that now underlies Sapporo and Chitose — the Shikotsu welded tuff that is still quarried as building stone. The lake is known as the northernmost in the country that does not freeze.
Winter is the highlight. Everything around it goes white while the water alone stays dark, and the contrast is at its sharpest.
Updates come once an hour, so reopening it may show the same picture. Days in Hokkaido are short: in December it is already dark by the middle of the afternoon.
About this camera
| Place | Chitose, Hokkaido |
| Format | Still, hourly |
| Time zone | Asia/Tokyo (UTC+9) |
| Category | Nature |
| Operator | Ministry of the Environment — Internet Nature Institute |
| Terms of use | PDL 1.0 |
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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