Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Flower Agate

A creamy pink-and-white chalcedony from Madagascar containing flower-like plume inclusions that resemble blossoms suspended in stone.

A brecciated, chatoyant quartz with swirling blue, gold, and brown fibers that shimmer like a stormy sky.

A landscape-patterned Chinese jasper prized for warm cherry-red, cream, and green bands resembling painted scenery.

A softly patterned jasper in cream, gray, and tan whose markings can suggest lotus petals, popular for calm, neutral-toned jewelry.

A black volcanic glass speckled with gray-white cristobalite snowflakes, formed as obsidian begins to crystallize.

An orbicular jasper with red and orange flower-like spots resembling poppies, famously from Morgan Hill, California.

A green-and-white volcanic breccia from Vancouver Island, cemented by jasper and rich in epidote, popular as a regional lapidary stone.

Black volcanic glass dotted with radiating spherulite bursts that look like exploding fireworks frozen in the stone.

A pegmatite rock of feldspar intergrown with wedge-shaped quartz that resembles ancient runic or Hebrew writing.

A rosette-shaped cluster of bladed gypsum or barite crystals that traps sand, forming flower-like formations in arid deserts.

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

Obsidian that has partly crystallized over time, growing pale spherulite clusters within the black glass, as in snowflake obsidian.

Obsidian formed from two merged lava flows, producing a stone with two distinct bands of sheen or color.