REENBELT, Md. — The giant March 11 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan also had effects a hemisphere away, breaking off icebergs in Antarctica, according to a study published Tuesday.

Scientists found that sea swell from the tsunami rippled through the Pacific basin and hit Antarctica, 8,000 miles (13,000 km) away. About 18 hours after the massive quake struck, waves broke off chunks of an ice-shelf that had been intact for nearly 50 years.

Together, the size of those icebergs torn from the shelf equaled 48 square miles (125 square km), or about two times the surface area of Manhattan.

‘This study presents the first observational evidence linking a tsunami to ice-shelf calving,’ its authors wrote in the Journal of Glaciology.

Douglas MacAyeal, one of the authors, said in a statement, ‘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, i.e., the plate tectonic system, can connect with another kind of seemingly unrelated event: the calving of icebergs from Antarctica’s ice sheet.’