Live camera
Mount Ngauruhoe live camera — North Island
A near-perfect stratovolcano cone. Striking under snow, and familiar to many people from film.
Sample August 2026What you are looking at
A GeoNet camera showing Mount Ngauruhoe, a stratovolcano close to a perfect cone.
It stands 2,291 metres. It piled up quickly at the southern end of the Tongariro vent system, over only a couple of thousand years or so, which is why the cone has not yet been eroded out of shape. That clean form is why it stood in as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films. It is also a sacred mountain to Maori, and climbing to the summit is discouraged.
New Zealand runs three to four hours ahead of Japan. A Japanese morning corresponds to the middle of the local day; by a Japanese evening it is already getting dark there.
Through the twentieth century this was a busy mountain. Something like seventy eruptions are recorded between 1839 and 1975, and in 1954 it poured out lava for months on end. Then 1975 was the last of them, and it has been quiet ever since. Half a century of stillness is unusual for a cone this young, which makes the shape on screen a mountain stopped partway through being built.
The seasons are reversed: Japanese summer is local winter. For the cone under snow, open it around July to September. This is country the westerly wind hits head-on, and the weather turns fast. The still refreshes every ten minutes, and nothing shows after dark.
About this camera
| Place | North Island |
| Format | Still, every 10 min |
| Time zone | Pacific/Auckland (UTC+12, DST UTC+13) |
| Category | Volcano |
| Operator | GeoNet New Zealand |
| Terms of use | CC BY 3.0 NZ |
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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- Ngauruhoe and TongariroNorth IslandStill, every 10 min