Uhhhh...no. What's going on here is YOU do not understand what's happening. The entire column decreased and it takes a while for the ocean to return to hydrostatic equilibrium.
Yes...journalists are by and large idiots...but in this case...the idiotic journalist knows more about this than you do.
Then the journalist fails to express what happened clearly, which is idiotic journalism. The story refers repeatedly to the water getting shallower.