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
Water *can* be compressed, just not by very much. In fact, the compressibility of water is so close to 0 that we might as well call it 0, hence the falsehood of saying water is uncompressible. For the record, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, 11 km below the surface of the sea, there is about 1,100 times the pressure as at sea level, and the water there only has about 94% of its volume at the surface.
For comparison, air would have about 0.09% of its volume at the same depth.
Everything is compressible, possibly excluding the abnormality of whatever exists at the singularly of a black hole, for which we have no physics. There is also some strange behavior with the degenerate matter in neutron stars, though there is some degree of compressibility there. Neither of those exceptions involve water or conditions anywhere close to anything you’ll find on Earth.
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