Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Goldstone

A man-made glittering glass packed with tiny copper crystals, traditionally reddish-brown but also made in blue and green.

A manganese aluminum garnet glowing in vivid orange to reddish-orange tones, with the finest called mandarin garnet.

A soft, reddish native metal with excellent conductivity, mined for wiring, plumbing, and alloys like bronze and brass.

A pleochroic aluminum silicate that flashes green and reddish-brown from different angles, with a cross-marked variety called chiastolite.

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

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

A fractured and re-cemented agate whose angular broken bands resemble crumbling walls and ruined cityscapes when polished.