Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Basalt

A fine-grained, dark volcanic rock that erupts as fluid lava and forms most of the ocean floor and many lava plateaus.

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

A mafic volcanic rock speckled with pale spherical 'varioles,' typically formed in rapidly chilled basaltic pillow lavas.

A coarse-grained, dark mafic intrusive rock that is the plutonic equivalent of basalt, rich in plagioclase and pyroxene.

A dark, highly vesicular volcanic rock full of gas bubbles, denser than pumice, common as red or black lava rock.

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

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

A dark, glass-rich volcanic rock of olivine and augite phenocrysts set in a feldspar-free glassy groundmass, named from the Kaiserstuhl region.

Rare precious opal from Tintenbar in northern New South Wales, Australia, occurring in volcanic basalt rather than sedimentary rock.

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

A dark, dense metamorphic rock dominated by hornblende and plagioclase, formed by medium- to high-grade metamorphism of basalt.

A depleted mantle peridotite of olivine and orthopyroxene, the refractory residue left after basaltic melt is extracted from the mantle.