Trapping of particles in nonlinear resonances in the presence of space charge and synchrotron motion may be a source of beam halo generation and beam loss in high intensity synchrotrons, in particular for extended storage times at the injection plateau as planned for the SIS100 synchrotron of the FAIR project. Although extensive simulation studies have theoretically demonstrated this mechanism, experimental evidence was so far limited to demonstration experiments at the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) in 2002–2003 using an octupolar resonance. Here we describe new experiments at the SIS18 synchrotron at GSI, where the resonance is driven by a sextupolar field error and horizontal static tune scans are taken across the resonance stop band. The new data significantly extend the previous observations by a complete set of measurements comparing beams with and without rf, both at low and high intensity. The correlation between transverse beam loss and simultaneous bunch length shortening provides strong evidence that the measured emittance and the loss in intensity are indeed caused by periodic resonance crossing, leading to the main effect of scattering but also to a lesser extent to the trapping of particles due to the combined effect of the nonlinear resonance and the space charge.