Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Gneiss

A high-grade metamorphic rock defined by alternating light and dark mineral bands, formed under intense heat and pressure.

A green, often mottled metamorphic rock formed by the hydration of mantle rocks, soft and waxy with a smooth, slippery feel.

An intensely blue metamorphic rock of lazurite flecked with golden pyrite, prized for millennia as a gemstone and ultramarine pigment.

A high-grade metamorphic gneiss of garnet, sillimanite, quartz, and graphite, derived from ancient aluminous sediments.

A calcium- and ferrous-iron-rich tourmaline, the iron analogue of uvite, forming dark brown to black crystals in skarns and metamorphic rocks.

Limonite is an amorphous brown iron oxide ore, the rust-colored material behind ochre pigments and bog iron.

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

Chromite is the only commercial ore of chromium, a black iron-chromium oxide of the spinel group found in mafic igneous rocks.

Ilmenite is the world's leading source of titanium, a heavy iron-black oxide common in mafic rocks and black sands.

A prized Idaho jasper known for porcelain-smooth pastel pinks, creams, and greens in soft swirling, orbicular patterns.

A green-and-red ornamental stone of epidote and red piemontite or iron oxide, named for its dragon-skin coloring; not a true jasper.

A dark green-and-black stromatolite jasper patterned with swirling orbs, formed from fossilized ancient microbial colonies.

A sedimentary rock built from pea-sized concentric spheres called pisoids, often carbonate but sometimes iron or aluminum-rich.

A vivid yellow-and-black banded stone from Indonesian volcanic vents, colored by sulfur, arsenic minerals and iron oxides, not true jasper.

A mica schist containing bladed blue kyanite crystals, a marker of medium- to high-grade metamorphism of aluminous rocks.