Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Greenstone

A general field term for green, low-grade metamorphosed basaltic rocks colored by chlorite, epidote, and actinolite.

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

A poorly sorted, muddy sandstone with abundant clay matrix between its grains, typically dark and deposited by turbidity currents.

The classic green ornamental gem, either jadeite or nephrite, valued for millennia for its toughness and rich color, especially imperial green.

A tough, dark, medium-grained igneous rock with the composition of basalt, common in dikes and sills.

Basalt that has been metamorphosed, developing new minerals like chlorite, actinolite, and epidote that give it a greenish color.

A tough, prized ornamental gem that is actually two distinct minerals, jadeite and nephrite, revered for millennia in many cultures.

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

A green, foliated low-grade metamorphic rock colored by chlorite, actinolite, and epidote, marking the greenschist metamorphic facies.

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

A vivid green copper carbonate mineral famous for swirling concentric bands, used as an ore of copper and an ornamental gemstone.

An altered granite mottled pink and green from feldspar and epidote, popular as a tough, colorful ornamental rock.

A rich green, fuchsite-rich metamorphic rock from southern Africa, prized as a carving and ornamental stone.

An altered granite of pink feldspar, green epidote and quartz, mottled pink-and-green and popular as a tumbled and carving stone.

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