Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Mica

A family of sheet silicate minerals that split into thin, flexible, shiny sheets, giving rocks a sparkling, layered appearance.

A green, vanadium-dominant garnet that forms in vanadium-rich metamorphic and sedimentary rocks, notably in uranium-vanadium districts.

Extremely hard surface rock formed when silica cements soil and sediment into a tough duricrust in arid landscapes.

A lustrous black titanium-rich garnet of the andradite series, found in alkaline igneous rocks like nepheline syenite and ijolite.

A dark hornblende-rich lamprophyre dike rock with amphibole and augite phenocrysts in an alkali-feldspar-dominated groundmass.

Rare precious opal from Tintenbar in northern New South Wales, Australia, occurring in volcanic basalt rather than sedimentary rock.

A rare zirconium-bearing garnet that crystallizes in carbonatites and alkaline rocks, first described from Magnet Cove, Arkansas.

A rare chlorine-bearing iron garnet-supergroup mineral, the ferric analogue of wadalite, formed in high-temperature combustion-metamorphic rocks.