If you still have some FORTRAN compiler installed you can run some simulations yourself [1]. There are two difficulties in 'easily' solving this problem. First of all the high level of feedback: changes in the sea level anywhere influence all other sea levels (conserving mass!). So you cannot solve this problem locally. Secondly, solving problems on spheres is difficult and expensive, so most sea level models solve the problem in spherical harmonics which is faster. (It's like the Fourier Transform, but instead of decomposing 1D signals into sines/cosines, you transform spherical shapes in more fundamental 'blobs'. See the examples here: [2] , after the header 'Jouons un peu avec les coeeficients harmoniques sphériques de la topography Terrestre'. You can see the individual first 0-6 'blobs', which when added form the first image reconstruction de l = 0 à 6. Which kind of resembles the Earth's topography already.) Spherical harmonics have some desirable mathematical properties and allow for quick simulations, but obviously formulating a problem in a different domain masks the actual physics being modeled. So I doubt you'll become wiser by studying these models...

Maybe you can be more convinced through [3] . Paolo Stocchi developed for the SELEN FORTRAN program.

[1] http://www.fis.uniurb.it/spada/SELEN_minipage.html (nb. this requires GMT, nearly impossible to install on Windows, and needs to be built from source in Linux. But OS X's homebrew has got it easily.)

[2] http://www.geologie.ens.fr/~vigny/cours/chp-gphy-2.html

[3] http://www.tudelft.nl/en/current/latest-news/article/detail/...