Instituto Geofísico EPN volcano cams

The Instituto Geofísico is part of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Quito, and it is the body responsible for watching every active volcano in Ecuador — a country with more of them per square kilometre than almost anywhere, including the Galápagos, 900 kilometres out in the Pacific.

Its work is not abstract. Quito itself sits on the flank of Guagua Pichincha; Cotopaxi's lahar paths run through farmland and towns an hour from the capital; Tungurahua forced the repeated evacuation of Baños for two decades. The institute issues the alert levels, runs the seismic and gas networks, and publishes daily reports that the national risk service acts on.

The camera on this site is one of thirteen the institute keeps on Cotopaxi: the visual camera at Putzalahua, on a hill south-west of the cone. Its images are published openly and credited to the institute, and they arrive as short loops of recent frames rather than as a continuous stream. Its full camera pages, for Cotopaxi and for the other volcanoes it watches, are linked from each image.