Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Cherry Creek Jasper

A landscape-patterned Chinese jasper prized for warm cherry-red, cream, and green bands resembling painted scenery.

Obsidian formed from two merged lava flows, producing a stone with two distinct bands of sheen or color.

Black volcanic glass that flashes flame-like bands of iridescent color when light strikes aligned nanoscale inclusions.

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

Pink beryl (morganite) that shows chatoyancy, a moving band of light, when cut as a cabochon, thanks to parallel tube inclusions.

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

A fortification agate from the Black Hills of South Dakota, known for tight, colorful banding closely related to the famous Fairburn agate.

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.

A coarse-grained intrusive rock with a distinctive salt-and-pepper look, the plutonic equivalent of andesite.

A fine-grained, intermediate volcanic rock common at subduction-zone volcanoes, between basalt and rhyolite in composition.

A dark, mineral-rich dike rock with abundant mica or amphibole phenocrysts set in a fine groundmass, often associated with gold and diamonds.

A dark, layered agpaitic nepheline syenite rich in sodic pyroxene and amphibole with eudialyte, from the Lovozero and Ilimaussaq complexes.

A coarse-grained alkali syenite of perthitic feldspar with sodic pyroxene or amphibole and minor nepheline, from Pulaski County, Arkansas.

One of the two jade minerals, an amphibole prized for its extreme toughness and soft, waxy green hues used in carving for millennia.

A pegmatitic granite in which quartz and feldspar intergrow to resemble ancient runic or Hebrew script.