I’ve been revisiting the fantastic descriptions of the alien ocean in Solaris by Stanislaw Lem, and I just want to share one part of one paragraph, which I hope does not constitute a copyright violation. His paragraphs are quite long however.

…if comparisons with Earth really have to be employed – these are formations larger in magnitude than Colorado’s Grand Canyon, modeled in a substance that on the outside has the consistency of jelly and foam (though the foam hardens into vast, brittle garlands, into tracery with immense holes, while some scientists have seen it as “skeletal excrescances”). Within, it turns into an ever firmer substance, like a flexed muscle, but one that quickly, at a depth of fifty feet or so, grows harder than rock, though it retains its elasticity. Extending for several miles between walls that stretch like membranes over a monster’s back and cling to its huge “skeleton” is the actual extensor, a seemingly independent format, like a colossal python that has swallowed an entire mountain chain and is now digesting it in silence, from time to time setting its body in slow, shuddering, fishlike contractions. But this is only what the extensor looks like from above, from the cabin of an aircraft. When you get close enough to it that the walls of the ravine rise hundreds of yards above the plane, the python’s torso turns out to be a moving expanse that stretches all the way to the horizon and is so dizzying it takes on the look of a passively bulging cylinder. The first impression is of a whirl of slick gray-green slime whose layers throw off powerful glints of sunlight; but when the craft hovers right over the surface (at such moments the edges of the ravine in which the extensor is concealed are like heights on either side of a geological depression), it can be seen that the motions are much more complex. They possess their own concentric rotations, darker streams intersect, and at times the outer mantle becomes a mirrored surface reflecting clouds and sky and shot through with loud explosive eruptions of its half-fluid, half-gaseous center. It slowly becomes clear that right below you is the central point of the forces holding up the parted sides that soar high into the sky and are composed of sluggishly crystallizing jelly…

Solaris, Stanislaw Lem

Like I said, that is one part of one paragraph. It goes on like that for a long time. There have been a couple movies, but it really is a case where a few words are worth a thousand pictures, and whatever you picture in your mind is better than anything the most talented movie special effects person could come up with.