Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Almandine Garnet

The most common garnet, an iron aluminum silicate in deep red to brownish-red hues, used as a gem and an industrial abrasive.

A picture jasper from the Owyhee region of Oregon and Idaho, prized for scenic tan, cream, and blue-grey landscape patterns.

A famous white to blue-grey Italian marble from Carrara, prized for centuries by sculptors and architects for its purity and fine grain.

A rare Indonesian jasper from Sulawesi known for ghostly tube structures, brecciated patterns, and contrasting grey, red, and purple zones.

A pink, manganese-rich variety of zoisite used as an ornamental gemstone, often mottled with white quartz and grey matrix.

Black volcanic glass studded with oval, peanut-shaped grey-white spherulites of radiating crystals frozen in the glass.

A trade term for orange garnets, mainly manganese-rich spessartine and the brownish hessonite variety of grossular.

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 dark, foliated schist rich in graphite that leaves a grey-black mark and forms from metamorphosed carbon-rich sediments.

A swirling, intricately banded lace agate from Eswatini (Swaziland) in soft greys, blues and lavenders with delicate folded patterns.

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

A heavy, lead-grey metallic mineral with perfect cubic cleavage, galena is the world's main ore of lead and often carries silver.