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Iceland Live Cameras — 6 official webcams
Six fixed cameras from the Icelandic Meteorological Office: the capital, the edge of a glacier, an empty highland, and Surtsey. Stills every ten minutes.
What you can see
All six belong to the Icelandic Meteorological Office (Veðurstofa Íslands). They sit at observation stations, so they are there to confirm what the weather is doing rather than to show a view. They are not video: one still is swapped in every ten minutes.
No two of them stand in the same kind of place. Reykjavík looks north from the roof of the office's own building, taking in city roofs, the bay and Mount Esja. Höfn looks across a lagoon at the outlet tongues of the Vatnajökull ice cap, the closest view of a glacier here. Hveravellir is an empty highland between two ice caps, Lake Mývatn is a shallow lake dammed by lava, and Mánárbakki sits at a farm on a peninsula facing the Arctic Ocean.
Surtsey is the odd one out. The island was born from undersea eruptions between 1963 and 1967, has been kept closed to people so that the way life settles there could be watched from the start, and became a World Heritage site in 2008. Only researchers with permission may land, which makes this camera one of the few windows onto it. Its picture updates once an hour, and some days none arrives.
6 cameras in Iceland
All 6 are still images. Tap one to open it in the camera list.
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Sample September 2026
Reykjavík, looking north
Reykjavík · City · Sea
A camera on the roof of the Icelandic Meteorological Office's own building on Bústaðavegur, pointed north. City roofs in the foreground, then Faxaflói bay, with the ridge of Mount Esja along the far side.
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Still, every 10 min
Hveravellir
Central Highlands · Nature
A geothermal field at 640 m, on the bare ground between the Langjökull and Hofsjökull ice caps. Apart from the patch of steam vents and hot springs it is lava and gravel desert, and the Kjölur road (35) that passes it is only open from early summer to autumn.
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Sample September 2026
Höfn, looking north
Hornafjörður, southeast · Nature · Sea
From the fishing town of Höfn, across the lagoon to the mountains behind. White outlet tongues of the Vatnajökull ice cap fill the gaps between the dark peaks. Grazing land and a weather mast in the foreground.
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Sample September 2026
Lake Mývatn, looking southeast
Mývatn, northeast · Nature
A shallow lake dammed by lava, with low islands scattered across it and marsh and grassland along the shore. It is known for the number of waterbirds it holds. The camera looks southeast across the water.
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Sample September 2026
Mánárbakki, looking northeast
Tjörnes peninsula, northeast · Sea · Nature
An observation site at a farm on the Tjörnes peninsula, between Öxarfjörður and Skjálfandi. Mown grass and a single road, and beyond them the horizon of the Arctic Ocean.
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Still, every 10 min
Surtsey, looking northeast
Vestmannaeyjar, off the south coast · Volcano · World Heritage · Sea
An island born from undersea eruptions between 1963 and 1967. It has been kept closed to people so that the way life settles on bare lava could be watched from the start, and it became a World Heritage site in 2008. Only researchers with permission may land. The picture here updates once an hour, and some days none arrives.
When to watch
Iceland stays on UTC all year and never moves to summer time, which puts it nine hours behind Japan. Local noon is 21:00 in Japan, so evening and late night in Japan is daytime there. Open them in the Japanese morning and it is night in Iceland.
At 64 degrees north the length of the day swings hard. In June it never gets properly dark; in December there are only about four hours of daylight. In winter, aim for 11:00 to 15:00 local time, which is 20:00 to midnight in Japan.
The source does not publish a viewing season, so we do not set one here. These are cameras for seeing the sky as it is now, not for catching the aurora or a particular state of the ice.
Agencies publishing the cameras on this page
- Icelandic Meteorological Office (Free to use with credit) — Official site
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.