Rock & Mineral Encyclopedia

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

Metaconglomerate

A conglomerate altered by heat and pressure, often with its rounded pebbles stretched and flattened into elongated lenses.

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

A common coarse-grained intrusive rock like granite but richer in plagioclase than potassium feldspar.

A foliated schist threaded with black tourmaline (schorl) needles, marking boron-rich metamorphic or metasomatic conditions.

A high-grade metamorphic gneiss of garnet, sillimanite, quartz, and graphite, derived from ancient aluminous sediments.

A dark, foliated schist rich in graphite that leaves a grey-black mark and forms from metamorphosed carbon-rich sediments.

A pink, manganese-rich variety of zoisite used as an ornamental gemstone, often mottled with white quartz and grey matrix.

The blue-grey relative of tiger's eye, a chatoyant quartz showing a shifting band of light like a bird of prey's eye.

A general term for light-colored, fine-grained volcanic rocks rich in quartz and feldspar, like rhyolite.