On January 15 the Hunga Tunga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in the Kingdom of Tonga erupted, producing a shockwave that was heard as far as Alaska and a tsunami that even reached the west coast of the United States. Most strikingly though was the gigantic ash plume that was visible on images from weather satellites in geostationary orbit.

With the images from the satellites GK2A (Korea), Himawari 8 (Japan) and GOES 17 (USA) I produced this animated 3D reconstruction of the cloud to give more perspective on its shape and gigantic size. According to my reconstruction, the plume reached as high as 60km, the lower levels of the mesosphere! More information about this reconstruction on twitter

Alternative version with heightmap colorization:

Cross-eye stereo animation of the eruption

Credits available here