Aso Nakadake & Kusasenri, Japan Live Cam

Kusasenri is a grassland basin below the active crater of Mount Aso Nakadake, and it fills this webcam view in Kumamoto Prefecture. A car park and the volcano museum stand in the foreground, and the ridge of the crater closes the horizon.

Aso is one of the largest calderas in the world, some 25 kilometres across, with more than a dozen cones inside it and towns and farms on its floor. Nakadake is the one still erupting, and access to the crater rim is closed whenever gas levels rise.

The grassland is burned off each spring in a controlled fire that keeps the pasture open, and it turns from pale straw to green over the following weeks. Horses graze the basin through the summer.