this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Water's not compressible, so the density doesn't change with depth. Either the bowling ball is denser than water or less dense than water.
Water is compressible; it has a bulk modulus of about 2.2 GPa. So at the 1086 bar at the bottom of the Mariana trench (~109 MPa), it'll have compressed about (109 / 2200) ~= 5%. Materials with a different bulk modulus to water may start to float at sufficiently high depths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulk_modulus#Selected_values
Water does change density with temperature, so it is denser the deeper you go. I doubt there's a normal bowling ball weight that would have the right density for it to float at some random depth though.