If water cannot be compressed, how does sound travel through it.

Question

I thought that sound waves effectively were a series of compressions within the medium they were travelling through. This could well be wrong.

In: Physics

Answer 1

materials that are close to in-compressible still transmit sound, think of glass – it’s a pretty good sound transmitter. Water resists compression even more than glass (by 20 times), but water is also a fluid, so it can definitely transmit waves even if it wasn’t compressible at all.