While water is incompressible for many engineering and approximate scientific uses, water does not know about that. It is a fluid of molecules and molecular clusters with sufficient unoccupied volume to allow compression and sufficient activity (molecular unrest) to fill an entire volume subject to the gravitation constraint for a liquid. Compression due to kinetic energy of the wave increases pressure causing an adverse potential energy gradient that brings the motion to a halt, like a pendulum rising against the acceleration of gravity. The favorable potential energy gradient beyond the increased pressure acts to accelerate fluid into a kinetic energy phase and the oscillation repeats to propagate as a wave.
For ocean acoustic waves one may posit that the response of the atoms and molecules in the molecular unrest to bulk motion is to adjust their shape in order to remain in harmony with themselves, that is they shorten to enable complete oscillations despite translation. It would amount to a small variation of atomic and molecular shape in addition to the molecular unrest. The potential energy in an enhanced pressure field that is imposed on a volume of fluid by wave kinetic energy is due to greater molecular density and molecular unrest intensity. As with gravitational refraction in the pendulum case, the pressure gradient accelerates atoms and molecules and their motion changes their shape as the kinetic energy of the wave. The key to this speculation is that reversible translation compensation actually moves the location of internal oscillations in matter.
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