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When glaciers and ice sheets lose mass, or when the hydrological cycle changes, the resulting sea-level changes will vary from place to place. Scientists call this phenomenon the “gravity, deformation, and rotation effect.” Especially due to the loss of ice, a lot of water is being re-located. As a result, the shape of Earth, its gravity field, and the way it’s rotating (the same rotation that cause days and nights), are all changing. The heavy ice sheets push the underlying solid earth downward under its weight, and the ice sheets’ gravitational pull attracts nearby ocean water. When the ice sheets lose water, it’s like they’re going on a diet, and losing weight; the solid Earth bounces back. Meanwhile, the ice sheets’ pull on the surrounding oceans weakens, and the water moves away from the ice sheets. The loss of ice mass causes a resulting drop in sea level close to the ice sheets, while at a greater distance, the tropics face ice-related sea-level rise of about 20 percent more than the global mean. NASA’s Virtual Earth System Laboratory (VESL) allows you to compute these spatial patterns, and to see how ice wastage over the past decades has changed sea levels all over the globe.