Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia
Search and identify 1,000+ rocks, minerals, crystals, and gemstones — with properties, formation, colors, hardness, and how to tell them apart.
Lemon Opal
A bright lemon-yellow opal, usually common opal, valued for its cheerful citrus color and translucent glow.
gemstone
Red Opal
An opal with a deep red body color, often a variety of Mexican fire opal, prized for its warm, glowing intensity.
gemstone
Nevada Opal
Opal mined in Nevada, famous for fiery black precious opal and opalized wood from the Virgin Valley district.
gemstone
Leopard Opal
A patterned common opal with mottled, leopard-like spots and blotches, prized as an ornamental and cabochon stone.
gemstone
Turquoise
A prized blue to blue-green copper-aluminium phosphate, often veined with dark matrix, treasured for jewelry across many cultures.
mineral
Cherry Opal
A translucent red opal, closely related to Mexican fire opal, glowing with a warm cherry-red body color often free of play-of-color.
gemstone
Pineapple Opal
A rare opal pseudomorph from White Cliffs, Australia, formed as opal replaced clustered crystals into a pineapple-like shape.
gemstone
Blue Opal
A soft blue common opal, famously from Peru, valued for its serene sky-to-teal color rather than play-of-color.
gemstone
Cat's Eye Opal
An opal cut to show chatoyancy, a sharp moving band of light like a cat's eye, usually in honey, green or yellow common opal.
gemstone
Lherzolite
The most common type of mantle peridotite, made of olivine with both orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene, representing fertile upper-mantle rock.
igneous
Shale
The most common sedimentary rock, a fissile mudrock of compacted clay and silt that splits into thin layers.
sedimentary
Indian Agate
An affordable multicolored banded and mossy chalcedony from India, common in tumbled stones, beads, and meditation pieces.
gemstone
Grandite Garnet
Grandite is an intermediate garnet between grossular and andradite, common in skarns and prized for vivid green to golden crystals.
mineral
Wehrite
An ultramafic rock of olivine and clinopyroxene, a peridotite variety common as cumulate layers in mafic intrusions.
igneous
Dacite
A fine-grained volcanic rock intermediate between andesite and rhyolite, common at explosive stratovolcanoes.
igneous
Diabase
A tough, dark, medium-grained igneous rock with the composition of basalt, common in dikes and sills.
igneous
White Opal
The most common precious opal, with a pale milky body that shows softer pastel flashes of play-of-color throughout.
gemstone
Pyrrhotite
A bronze-colored iron sulfide notable for being the most magnetic of the common sulfide minerals and an important nickel host.
mineral
Ilmenite
Ilmenite is the world's leading source of titanium, a heavy iron-black oxide common in mafic rocks and black sands.
mineral
Blue Jasper
An opaque blue variety of chalcedony jasper, less common than red or green forms, colored by mineral inclusions.
mineral
Albite
The sodium end-member of the plagioclase feldspar series, a common white rock-forming mineral and parent of peristerite moonstone.
mineral
Granodiorite
A common coarse-grained intrusive rock like granite but richer in plagioclase than potassium feldspar.
igneous
Milky Quartz
The most common variety of quartz, milky white from microscopic fluid and gas inclusions, forming massive veins worldwide.
crystal
Blue Calcite
A soft, soothing powder-blue variety of calcite, a common calcium carbonate mineral often sold as gentle tumbled stones.
mineral