Continents are basically rafts of granite. Like any raft, if you put more stuff on it, it sinks a bit.
I was imagining this as like compressing a sponge and never quite believed that re-expanding would take thousands of years.
But an enormous raft of granite, floating on an extremely viscous sea of even denser hot rock? At least I can see clearly that I have no useful intuitions about this. Does the raft bob up and down on a ten thousand year time scale? (Probably too heavily damped to oscillate) But the raft metaphor implies some lateral flow of the "sea" as the raft rises, so that is something to think about.