Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Sandstone

A clastic sedimentary rock made of cemented sand grains, often quartz, recording ancient beaches, deserts, and rivers.

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

Precious opal that forms in thin veins within brown ironstone boulders, cut with the host rock left as a natural dark backing.

A porous sedimentary rock naturally saturated with bitumen, dark, tarry-smelling, and historically mined for paving.

A coarse, feldspar-rich sandstone, often pink, that records rapid erosion of granitic source rock under arid conditions.

An extremely hard metamorphic rock formed from sandstone, made of fused quartz grains that break across rather than between the grains.

Sand-grained limestone composed of carbonate particles such as shell fragments and ooids cemented into a calcite rock.

A hard, dark, poorly sorted sandstone with a muddy matrix, typically deposited by underwater turbidity currents.

A graded sedimentary deposit laid down by underwater turbidity currents, recording avalanches of sediment cascading down submarine slopes.

A lithified glacial till, a poorly sorted rock of mixed boulders, pebbles and fine matrix that records ancient glaciations.

A hard, tough metamorphic rock of fused quartz grains, formed by recrystallizing quartz sandstone under heat and pressure.

Opal in which precious play-of-color is intimately dispersed through the pores of its host rock rather than forming a solid seam.

A feldspar-rich sandstone, often pink, that points to granitic source rocks eroded quickly in dry or cold climates.

A fine-grained clastic rock of silt-sized grains, intermediate between sandstone and mudstone, with a gritty feel.

A very fine-grained sedimentary rock made mostly of clay minerals, smooth to the touch and lacking the gritty feel of siltstone.