Why can air be compressed but not water?
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*Everything* can be compressed. Gases just have the property that, for a given amount of material and pressure, the volume and pressure are inversely related. To be more ELI5: doubling the pressure halves the volume, and vice versa.
Solids and liquids instead have a “bulk modulus” which defines how pressure causes compression. The number for water is 2.2 GPa and for diamond it’s 443 GPa. If you want to compress a substance by, say, 1%, you need to apply a pressure of 1% of its bulk modulus, 22 MPa (3200 psi) in the case of water.
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