Those are great images indeed, very beautiful and seem to come from another reality. I used to do something similar in the past, with a 3d render application called BRYCE: I created a simple 3d terrain and some objects, applied textures on them and then, I created a liquid object in front of the camera, covering its view. I then tweaked the texture of that object, its transparency, translucency, the colors, its surface granularity etc and it was like seeing the landscape through a distortion lens.
It is very enjoyable to explore such digital environments and find beautiful pictures, sometimes what you find is very surprising.
I also used Bryce a few years ago, but never experimented the way you describe, using refraction to add distortion. That's an interesting method. All of my images are created with a camera inside of a sphere, which I tweak and manipulate, and then with some added processing in Photoshop.
Thanks for your compliments, and taking the time to look at my post!