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There are several reasons, the main one being that glaciers and ice sheets exert a large gravitational pull.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gravity-of-glacial-melt

http://m.nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/why-our-intuition-abo...

From the last article:

"Three things happen. One is that you’re dumping all of this melt water into the ocean. So the mass of the entire ocean would definitely be going up if ice sheets were melting—as they are today. The second thing that happens is that this gravitational attraction that the ice sheet exerts on the surrounding water diminishes. As a consequence, water migrates away from the ice sheet. The third thing is, as the ice sheet melts, the land underneath the ice sheet pops up; it rebounds."



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