What you can see on the Niijima cam
Niijima shows as a long, low ridge whose face is streaked with pale bare rock, the light rhyolite the island is built from. In full sun that rock reads almost white against the darker scrub, and the contrast is strongest on clear days.
Pale cliffs along a low island ridge
Beyond a strip of low coastal scrub, a long ridge runs across the bottom of the frame under a broad sky. Its face is streaked with pale bare rock, and its skyline rises gently to a high point in the middle before dropping to a separate, lower summit on the right. The caption names the camera's site, Shikine, the small island just off Niijima's south-west tip, so the ridge in view is Niijima itself.
The pale rock is rhyolite, the light, frothy stone the islanders call kōga. It is quarried nowhere else in Japan, and houses, walls and benches on the island are built from it.
Kōga, the stone that floats
The rhyolite of Mukaiyama cooled into a frothy, light grey stone the islanders call kōga. It is light enough to float, soft enough to saw by hand, and it is quarried nowhere else in Japan — the only comparable deposit in the world is on Lipari, off Sicily. Houses, walls and public benches on the island are built from it, and it is melted to make the olive-green glass that Niijima is known for. The eruptions that produced it, at Mukaiyama in the south and Achiyama in the north, happened in the ninth century CE and are the last known activity here. Earthquake swarms shook the island several times during the twentieth century without anything following.
When to watch Niijima
Summer is surf season on Habushiura, the 6 km beach on the east coast, and the light is strongest then. Winter afternoons give the cleanest views across from Shikinejima. Japan is nine hours ahead of UTC.
Around Niijima
Yunohama is an open-air hot spring on the shore, free and open all night, built in the shape of a Greek amphitheatre out of local stone. Shikinejima, twenty minutes away by boat, has its own seaside baths among the rocks.
Visiting Niijima
Ferries run from Takeshiba in Tokyo, overnight or by fast jetfoil, and there are flights from Chōfu. Walking routes cross both dome groups, and the quarries can be seen from the road.
