Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.

Onyx

A banded variety of chalcedony quartz, classically black or black-and-white, long favored for cameos and beads.

A banded variety of chalcedony quartz, famed for its colorful concentric layers and enormous range of patterns and colors.

A pink, manganese-rich variety of zoisite used as an ornamental gemstone, often mottled with white quartz and grey matrix.

A jasper made of angular fragments naturally cemented back together, typically showing red and brown pieces in a quartz matrix.

A vivid blue-green hydrated copper silicate, soft on its own but prized as a gem when hardened by intergrown quartz or chalcedony.

A group of coarse, water-rich plutonic rocks dominated by large hornblende crystals set in feldspar, intermediate between lamprophyre and diorite.

Opal without play-of-color, valued for solid body hues; also called potch, it occurs in a wide range of colors worldwide.

A banded, metamorphosed iron formation in which bright red jasper alternates with silvery hematite or magnetite layers.

An ultramafic rock of olivine and clinopyroxene, a peridotite variety common as cumulate layers in mafic intrusions.

A variety of pyroxenite composed of both orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene with little olivine, found in layered intrusions and the mantle.

A dense, dark ultramafic plutonic rock composed almost entirely of pyroxene minerals, often associated with peridotite and layered intrusions.

A metasomatic rock formed when alkali-rich fluids from carbonatite or alkaline intrusions transform surrounding country rock.

A contact-metasomatic calc-silicate rock, essentially a skarn, formed where intrusions react with carbonate rocks and often host ore.

A tough, fine-grained contact-metamorphic rock containing cordierite, often spotted, formed by heat from nearby igneous intrusions.