Scientists using the European Envisat satellite have shown that the March 11 Pacificwide tsunami cracked an ice shelf in Antarctica, calving medium-size icebergs.

Their findings, published online Monday in the Journal of Glaciology, is the first firm proof that a tsunami can create mountains of floating ice more than 11,000 miles away.

Kelly Brunt, an ice specialist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues were able to link the calving of icebergs from the Sulzberger Ice Shelf in Antarctica with the tsunami generated by the 9.0 quake off northern Japan.

Japan is still suffering the effects of the multifaceted disaster, which produced seismic sea waves that also hit Hawaii and parts of the U.S. West Coast.

The waves that hit the Sulzberger Ice Shelf, southwest of Tierra del Fuego, 18 hours after the quake were only about a foot high, but that was enough to break the ice, the scientists said.

Using satellite images, Brunt, along with Emile Okal at Northwestern University and Douglas MacAyeal at the University of Chicago, spotted new icebergs floating off to sea soon after the sea swell hit Antarctica.

The possibility had been posed by scientists in the 1970s, but never proved.

"This is an example not only of the way in which events are connected across great ranges of oceanic distance, but also how events in one kind of Earth system, that is, the plate tectonic system, can connect with another kind of seemingly unrelated event: the calving of icebergs from Antarctica’s ice sheet," MacAyeal said in a news release.