Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Quartzite

An extremely hard metamorphic rock formed from sandstone, made of fused quartz grains that break across rather than between the grains.

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

A hard, tough metamorphic rock of fused quartz grains, formed by recrystallizing quartz sandstone under heat and pressure.

A tough, quartz-rich sandstone cemented by silica, transitional toward true quartzite but still sedimentary in origin.

An opaque, snow-white variety of quartz whose milky color comes from countless tiny gas and fluid inclusions.

A green quartz speckled with shimmering fuchsite mica that produces a glittering aventurescence, popular as an affordable ornamental stone.

A metamorphic rock made chiefly of manganese-rich spessartine garnet and quartz, formed from ancient manganese-bearing sediments.

A colorful trade-name material, often dyed and reconstituted, sold as jasper; vivid blues and greens are typically artificially enhanced.

Sandstone altered by metamorphism, with partly recrystallized quartz grains, transitional between true sandstone and quartzite.

Tabular quartz crossed by a milky white thread-like line marking where the crystal repeatedly cracked and re-healed.