Planet Earth

Live Volcano Webcams: Watch Active Volcanic Eruptions in Real Time

Volcanoes are among the most powerful geological forces on Earth, responsible for shaping landscapes, creating new land and cycling minerals through the atmosphere and oceans. The two cameras in this section represent two fundamentally different types of volcanic activity. Kilauea on Hawaii's Big Island is a shield volcano fed by a deep mantle hotspot, producing fluid basaltic lava that has been erupting nearly continuously for decades. Volcan de Fuego in Guatemala sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, where the Cocos tectonic plate subducts beneath the Caribbean plate, generating more explosive andesitic eruptions with pyroclastic flows and ash columns visible from Guatemala City. Watching these feeds offers real-time insight into the geological processes that have shaped Earth's surface for 4.5 billion years. USGS volcanologists monitor Kilauea around the clock, measuring sulphur dioxide emissions, seismic activity and ground deformation to understand eruption dynamics and protect local communities living on active lava fields.

Live Space Streams: International Space Station Earth View and SpaceX Starship Development

The cameras in this section give students and educators a direct window into humanity's most ambitious engineering projects. The International Space Station orbits Earth at approximately 28,000 kilometres per hour, completing a full orbit every 92 minutes at an altitude of around 425 kilometres. The live exterior camera captures the curvature of Earth, the razor-sharp terminator line between day and night, weather systems, ocean colour, city lights and the aurora, from a perspective impossible to see any other way. The ISS hosts continuous microgravity research into biology, physics, materials science and medicine that cannot be conducted on Earth's surface. NASA's live channel broadcasts mission events including spacewalks, spacecraft dockings, crew arrivals and science briefings as they happen. The Starbase Live camera at Boca Chica, Texas documents SpaceX's development of the Starship launch system, at 121 metres tall the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, capable of 74 meganewtons of thrust. Watching Starship development in real time gives students a rare opportunity to observe the iterative engineering process of a vehicle designed to carry humans to the Moon and eventually Mars.

Live African Safari Cameras: Wildlife Waterholes in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe

Waterholes are the ecological heartbeat of African savanna ecosystems. In regions where rainfall is intensely seasonal, a permanent water source becomes a congregation point for virtually every species in the landscape, from the largest elephant herds to the smallest birds. The four cameras here cover four distinct African ecosystems and four countries. Great Plains TV rotates between hidden cameras across Botswana, Kenya and Zimbabwe, capturing the daily rhythms of life including mega-tusker elephants at the Selinda Reserve waterhole, hippos and crocodiles on the Zambezi River at Tembo Plains, and lions and painted wild dogs in the Okavango. The Namib Desert waterhole documents how desert-adapted species including gemsbok oryx, with their remarkable ability to raise their body temperature to 45 degrees Celsius rather than sweat, survive in one of the oldest and most arid environments on Earth. Tembe Elephant Park in KwaZulu-Natal is home to some of the last truly giant tuskers, elephants carrying tusks exceeding 45 kilograms, representing a critical conservation success story. Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe hosts one of the largest concentrations of elephants on Earth, with over 50,000 animals, alongside Africa's full complement of large predators including lion, leopard, cheetah and African wild dog.

Live Underwater Cameras: Coral Reefs, Marine Ecosystems and Aquarium Live Streams

The ocean covers 71 percent of Earth's surface and contains an estimated 700,000 to one million species, the vast majority still unknown to science. Coral reefs, despite covering less than 0.1 percent of the ocean floor, support approximately 25 percent of all marine species, making them the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth per unit area. The Coral City Camera at PortMiami, a collaboration between Coral Morphologic and NOAA, documents a remarkable urban reef ecosystem and provides continuous visual data for researchers studying reef resilience in a warming ocean. Over 185 fish species have been recorded at this single fixed camera, including daily manatee visits, lemon sharks and goliath grouper. The Florida Keys camera covers part of the Florida Reef Tract, the only living barrier reef in the continental United States and the third largest in the world, home to over 1,400 species of marine plants and animals. The Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish camera shows Pacific sea nettles, animals with no brain, heart, blood or bones that have survived all five major mass extinction events and remained essentially unchanged for over 500 million years. The EXPLORE.org tropical reef tank demonstrates the extraordinary density of life that living coral structures support, a density that takes decades to develop and can be destroyed in hours by bleaching events.

Live Forest Wildlife Cameras: Woodland Ecosystems, Wolf Pack Behaviour and European Wildlife

Forest ecosystems cover approximately 31 percent of Earth's land surface and are home to more than 80 percent of terrestrial biodiversity. The cameras here span two continents and two very different approaches to observing woodland life. Morten Hilmer's camera in Northern Denmark is part of an active rewilding project in which the photographer has worked to restore natural ecological processes to his land, removing artificial barriers and allowing native species to return. The footage captures genuine behavioural rhythms across all four seasons, including red deer sparring in autumn, badgers foraging at night, stone marten and foxes visiting the stream, and the full complexity of a functioning European woodland ecosystem that has largely vanished from the continent. The International Wolf Center in Ely, Minnesota provides a scientific perspective on wolf ecology and is dedicated to advancing the survival of wolf populations through education and research. Wolves are a keystone species: their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in 1995 triggered a trophic cascade that changed elk behaviour, allowed riverbank willows and aspens to recover, stabilised eroding riverbanks and ultimately altered the course of rivers, one of the most dramatic demonstrations of how apex predators regulate entire ecosystems.

Live Bird Cams: Bald Eagle Nest, Cornell Lab FeederWatch and Garden Bird Feeding Stations

Birds are among the most scientifically valuable animals for ecological monitoring, serving as indicators of ecosystem health across virtually every habitat on Earth. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology FeederWatch camera at Sapsucker Woods, Ithaca forms part of Project FeederWatch, one of the world's largest citizen science programmes, in which tens of thousands of volunteers across North America contribute observations that help scientists track long-term bird population changes. Species documented at this camera include northern cardinals, blue jays, downy woodpeckers, white-breasted nuthatches, dark-eyed juncos and red-winged blackbirds, whose seasonal appearances mark the turning of the year. The Big Bear Bald Eagle nest camera in the San Bernardino Mountains of California monitors Jackie and Shadow, a wild breeding pair nesting 145 feet up in a Jeffrey Pine. The bald eagle was removed from the United States Endangered Species List in 2007 following one of conservation's great success stories: a recovery from fewer than 500 breeding pairs in the lower 48 states in the 1960s, caused by DDT thinning eggshells, to over 9,000 pairs today following the pesticide ban and federal protection. Watching an active nest documents raptor breeding biology, incubation behaviour, hatching, eaglet development and the extraordinary parental investment of one of North America's largest birds of prey.

Scheduled Live Science Streams: Deep Ocean Hydrothermal Vents and Amazon Rainforest Cameras

Some of the most scientifically significant environments on Earth are accessible only through scheduled or intermittent live streams. The Ocean Observatories Initiative hydrothermal vent camera at Axial Seamount streams from the ASHES vent field, 1.5 kilometres beneath the North Pacific and 400 kilometres off the Oregon coast. Hydrothermal vents were first discovered in 1977 during a Galapagos Rift expedition and immediately rewrote the boundaries of biology, demonstrating that entire ecosystems could be powered by chemosynthesis rather than photosynthesis, sustained by the chemical energy of superheated mineral-rich water rather than sunlight. The tube worms, bacterial mats and specialised crustaceans visible around the Mushroom chimney at 260 degrees Celsius represent life in conditions once thought impossible, and have profoundly shaped the search for life on ocean moons such as Europa and Enceladus. The Amazon rainforest camera at the Junglekeepers Reserve in the Las Piedras watershed, southeastern Peru, documents one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The Amazon basin contains an estimated 10 percent of all species on Earth, produces approximately 20 percent of the world's freshwater river discharge and cycles around 20 billion tonnes of water vapour into the atmosphere each day through transpiration, making it a critical regulator of both regional and global climate.