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This year researchers witnessed for the first time evidence of an ice mass separation triggered by a tsunami.

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Until this discovery scientists could only speculate this was possible.

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The large mass of ice separated from the coast of Antarctica on a part of the continent called the Sulzberger Ice Shelf.

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The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in March of this year also generated sea swell that propagated throughout the Pacific basin, as seen in this model.

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Within 18 hours the first series of waves bombarded the ice shelf, located 8,000 miles away, ultimately resulting in a mass of ice 50 square miles in size being shed from the continent.

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Evidence of the separation was first observed in images captured by NASA's Aqua and Terra satellites.

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Looking through a hole in the clouds, researches spotted a single iceberg roughly the size of Manhattan, drifting off the coast of the ice shelf.

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Using radar imagery from a European Space Agency satellite, scientists discovered not only one, but two large icebergs, along with several smaller pieces of ice that had separated from the continent.