Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Bismuthinite

A soft lead-gray bismuth sulfide that is an important ore of bismuth, forming metallic needle-like and bladed crystals.

A chalcedony agate with soft, billowing cloud-like masses of gray and white suspended in a translucent body.

Fine, golden, hair-like strands of basaltic volcanic glass spun from fluid lava droplets during eruptions, named for the Hawaiian volcano goddess.

A mottled, multicolored obsidian blending black, brown, grey, and tan patches like a calico cat's patchwork coat.

The blue-grey relative of tiger's eye, a chatoyant quartz showing a shifting band of light like a bird of prey's eye.

A black volcanic glass threaded with delicate grey, swirling lace-like bands of flow lines that show beautifully when polished.

A granite-like rock containing orthopyroxene, formed at high temperatures and pressures and often classed with the granulites.

A rare granitic rock containing concentric, onion-like spheres called orbicules, prized as a striking ornamental stone.

A high-grade metamorphic rock formed in the deep, hot crust, marked by anhydrous minerals like pyroxene and garnet.

A black-and-white striped chalcedony-quartz rock whose bold zebra-like banding makes it a popular ornamental and lapidary stone.

A hard, fine-grained siliceous rock with a dull porcelain-like texture, intermediate between soft diatomite and dense chert.

An earthy aluminum-rich residual rock and the world's principal ore of aluminum, often showing distinctive pea-like pisolites.

A dark, foliated schist rich in needle-like hornblende crystals, formed by metamorphism of mafic igneous rocks.

A general term for light-colored, fine-grained volcanic rocks rich in quartz and feldspar, like rhyolite.

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