Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Pyroxenite

A dense, dark ultramafic plutonic rock composed almost entirely of pyroxene minerals, often associated with peridotite and layered intrusions.

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

A schist derived from clay-rich sediments, rich in mica and often bearing index minerals like garnet, staurolite, or kyanite.

A sandstone in which the dominant grains are fragments of pre-existing rocks rather than single minerals, signaling rapid erosion nearby.

A contact-metasomatic calc-silicate rock, essentially a skarn, formed where intrusions react with carbonate rocks and often host ore.

A rare black carbon-rich rock from Russia, noted for containing fullerenes and ranging from dull mineralized stone to lustrous noble shungite.

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

A tough, fine-grained contact-metamorphic rock containing cordierite, often spotted, formed by heat from nearby igneous intrusions.

A tough, fine-grained, non-foliated rock formed by the intense heat of nearby magma baking surrounding rock at contact zones.

A fine-grained, sodium-rich contact-metasomatic rock formed where shale is albitized next to intruding diabase or spilite.

A dull, resinous volcanic glass similar to obsidian but with higher water content and a waxy pitch-like luster.

A dense, black, mid-rank coal with high energy content, widely used for power generation and to make coke for steelmaking.

A Mexican banded agate famous for tightly swirling, contorted lacy patterns in warm reds, creams, and golds.

An old name for cesium-rich, often pink beryl (related to morganite), named after Russian mineralogist Victor Vorobyev.

The colorless to milky-white variety of beryl, known mineralogically as goshenite and once used to imitate diamond and other gems.