earthquake-mcp-server

Public Hosted Server: https://earthquake.caseyjhand.com/mcp

Overview

Seismic data from USGS ComCat and the EMSC SeismicPortal. Fetch real-time earthquake feeds, search and count seismic events by time, magnitude, depth, and location, and pull full analysis detail for a single event. Runs as a stdio process, a local Streamable HTTP server, or the public hosted endpoint above.

Tools

Resources

Related MCP server: usgs-earthquakes

Capability reference

earthquake_get_feed tool

• Choose a magnitude tier (all, 1.0, 2.5, 4.5, significant) and a window (hour, day, week, month). USGS caches these feeds; use earthquake_search for historical or filtered queries.

• Returns events, page count, generation time, and source feed URL. all includes microseisms; significant is USGS-curated using magnitude, felt reports, and PAGER impact.

• limit defaults to 100, max 1000. totalCount reports the whole feed and nextCursor retrieves another page; pass the opaque cursor back unchanged.

earthquake_search tool

• Search usgs or emsc by time, magnitude, depth, radius, or bounding box. A radius requires latitude, longitude, and radius_km together; box edges are independently optional, support antimeridian bounds up to ±360°, and intersect a supplied circle.

• Returns normalized events with event_type and EMSC's event_certainty. ignoredFilters names unsupported filters; queryEcho reports the effective query.

• Sort by time or magnitude in either direction. limit defaults to 100, max 20,000; paging uses a 1-based offset. Capped results carry nextOffset and totalCount, or countUnavailable if the count lookup failed. Use earthquake_count first to size the match set.

earthquake_count tool

• Count matches using the same filters as earthquake_search, without fetching events. Omit start_time for the last 30 days; queryEcho reports the resolved window and applied filters.

• exceeds_limit flags counts above 20,000. max_allowed is 20,000 for USGS and null for EMSC; ignoredFilters names filters the source cannot apply.

earthquake_get_event tool

• Pass a USGS event_id from the id field of a feed or search result (e.g. us6000sznj). EMSC has no per-event detail endpoint.

• Returns the normalized event plus optional detail: PAGER, ShakeMap, DYFI, moment tensor, ground-failure alerts, origin quality, and finite-fault dimensions. Groups are omitted when USGS produced no corresponding product.

earthquake://feed/{magnitude_tier}/{time_window} resource

• Choose the same magnitude tiers and time windows as earthquake_get_feed; all 20 combinations are listed as browsable resources.

• Returns the whole feed as application/json, with a public 60-second cache hint. Broad week/month feeds can contain thousands of events; use earthquake_get_feed for paging.

earthquake://event/{event_id} resource

• Pass a USGS event_id from a feed or search result. Returns the same event and optional detail products as earthquake_get_event.

• Uses that tool's not_found, source_unavailable, and source_timeout error contract.

Features

Built on @cyanheads/mcp-ts-core: stdio and Streamable HTTP transports, pluggable auth (none / jwt / oauth), swappable storage (in-memory, filesystem, Supabase, Cloudflare KV/R2/D1), structured logging with optional OpenTelemetry tracing.

USGS/EMSC-specific:

• Type-safe clients for the USGS FDSN/GeoJSON API and the EMSC FDSN-WS API, normalizing both into one shared earthquake domain schema

• Automatic retry with backoff and per-request timeouts on every upstream call; detects USGS's rate-limited/CDN failure mode (HTML served instead of GeoJSON) and maps it to a typed service-unavailable error instead of parsing it as data

• EMSC's two-character evtype code is decoded against the published event-type/certainty nomenclature into the same vocabulary USGS publishes, so event_type carries one meaning across both sources

• USGS-only filters (alert_level, min_felt, min_significance, event_type) are named in ignoredFilters when source=emsc. On USGS, event_type="earthquake" excludes quarry blasts and other non-tectonic records.

• No API key or rate-limit tier required — both USGS and EMSC are fully public, keyless APIs

Agent-friendly output:

• Provenance — source: "usgs" | "emsc" on every response, plus source_catalog/auth fields naming the catalog and authoritative agency, so agents can weigh two independent solutions against each other

• Discriminated output contracts — event_type and event_certainty travel with every event so a quarry blast or a suspected explosion is never silently read as a confirmed earthquake; exceeds_limit, countUnavailable, and truncated flags let callers branch on data instead of parsing prose

• Response shaping — fields a source does not publish come back null, never a fabricated zero (tsunami, status, and mmi are always null on EMSC events); USGS-only filters dropped for an EMSC query are named in ignoredFilters rather than silently ignored

• Graceful degradation — an upstream rejection surfaces the service's own explanation (offending parameter, accepted format) in the error message instead of a bare status code, and a failed follow-up count degrades to countUnavailable rather than failing the whole search

Getting started

Public Hosted Instance

A public instance is available at https://earthquake.caseyjhand.com/mcp — no installation required. Point any MCP client at it via Streamable HTTP:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthquake-mcp-server": {
      "type": "streamable-http",
      "url": "https://earthquake.caseyjhand.com/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Self-Hosted / Local

Add the following to your MCP client configuration file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthquake-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "bunx",
      "args": ["@cyanheads/earthquake-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with npx (no Bun required):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthquake-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@cyanheads/earthquake-mcp-server@latest"],
      "env": {
        "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE": "stdio",
        "MCP_LOG_LEVEL": "info"
      }
    }
  }
}

Or with Docker:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthquake-mcp-server": {
      "type": "stdio",
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["run", "-i", "--rm", "-e", "MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=stdio", "ghcr.io/cyanheads/earthquake-mcp-server:latest"]
    }
  }
}

For Streamable HTTP, set the transport and start the server:

MCP_TRANSPORT_TYPE=http MCP_HTTP_PORT=3010 bun run start:http
# Server listens at http://localhost:3010/mcp

Prerequisites

• Bun v1.4.0 or higher.

• No API keys required — USGS and EMSC data is fully public.

Installation

1. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/cyanheads/earthquake-mcp-server.git

2. Navigate into the directory:

cd earthquake-mcp-server

3. Install dependencies:

bun install

Configuration

All configuration is validated at startup via Zod schemas in src/config/server-config.ts. Key environment variables:

Empty values and unsubstituted whole-value ${…} placeholders use the defaults. See .env.example for optional overrides.

Running the server

Local development

• Build and run the production version:

  # One-time build
  bun run rebuild
  
  # Run the built server
  bun run start:http
  # or
  bun run start:stdio

• Run checks and tests:

  bun run devcheck  # Lints, formats, type-checks, and more
  bun run test      # Runs the test suite

Docker

docker build -t earthquake-mcp-server .
docker run --rm -p 3010:3010 earthquake-mcp-server

The Dockerfile defaults to HTTP transport, stateless session mode, and logs to /var/log/earthquake-mcp-server. OpenTelemetry peer dependencies are installed by default — build with --build-arg OTEL_ENABLED=false to omit them.

Project structure

Development guide

See CLAUDE.md for development guidelines and architectural rules. The short version:

• Handlers throw, framework catches — no try/catch in tool logic

• Use ctx.log for logging, ctx.state for storage

• Register new tools and resources in the createApp() arrays

• Validate upstream data, normalize to domain types, and preserve missing values rather than inventing facts

Contributing

Issues are welcome. Run checks and tests before submitting:

bun run devcheck
bun run test

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See the LICENSE file for details.