Earthscope Fdsn MCP Server

@pipeworx/earthscope-fdsn

Seismic station metadata, federated waveform holdings and regional earthquake catalogues, over the international FDSN web-service standard.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1863+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

This is the instrument side of seismology, not the global earthquake catalogue — usgs-earthquakes and emsc already cover "what earthquakes happened". fdsn_events here adds the REGIONAL agency catalogues, which list the local magnitude-1-to-3 seismicity the global catalogues never publish.

Tools

• fdsn_stations(network?, station?, channel?, level?, lat/lon/radius or bbox, …) — where seismometers are, what they record, who operates them, and when.
• fdsn_events(datacenter?, starttime?, min_magnitude?, …) — regional agency earthquake catalogues: gfz (global rapid solutions), ingv (Italy), resif (France), koeri (Turkey).
• fdsn_availability(network, station?, channel?, starttime?, endtime?) — which FDSN data centres hold waveform data for a channel and time window, with each centre's dataselect URL.

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

• https://service.earthscope.org/fdsnws/station/1/query — station metadata.
• https://service.earthscope.org/irisws/fedcatalog/1/query — federated holdings.
• https://geofon.gfz.de/fdsnws/event/1/query, https://webservices.ingv.it/fdsnws/event/1/query, https://api.franceseisme.fr/fdsnws/event/1/query, http://www.koeri.boun.edu.tr/services/fdsnws/event/1/query — regional catalogues.

Things the next person would otherwise rediscover (all verified 2026-09-17)

• service.iris.edu 301-redirects to service.earthscope.org. Both work; the old host costs a redirect on every call, so the new one is used directly.
• EarthScope serves only station and dataselect under /fdsnws/. Their event and availability services answer HTTP 404. Availability is behind an EarthScope login — it redirects to a trailing-slash path served by uvicorn with vary: Cookie. That is why fdsn_availability answers from irisws/fedcatalog instead: keyless, and it reports the same holdings question across every federated data centre rather than one.
• nodata=404 makes an empty result indistinguishable from a retired endpoint — both are a bare 404 with an empty body, which is exactly how the retired event service was nearly mistaken for "no earthquakes". These tools send nodata=204, so an empty result is a 204 and a 404 genuinely means the route is gone.
• Field names differ between level=station and level=channel, and the depth column is spelled Depth/km at one agency and Depth/Km at another, so rows are read by header name with aliases rather than by position.
• fedcatalog answers in its own format=request dialect, not FDSN text: blank-line-separated blocks, each opening with KEY=value service lines and then bare NET STA LOC CHA START END rows.
• FDSN maxradius is in DEGREES of arc, not km. The tools take km and convert (÷ 111.195).

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthscope-fdsn": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/earthscope-fdsn/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/earthscope-fdsn/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — ask_pipeworx, discover_tools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

This is deliberate, not multiplexing by accident. The meta-tools are what let a scoped connection answer a question this pack does not cover — via ask_pipeworx, which routes across the whole catalog — without you adding a second MCP server. There is currently no way to mount a pack endpoint without them; if the extra schemas cost you more context than the routing is worth, connect to the full gateway once rather than to several pack endpoints.

Or connect to the full Pipeworx gateway to get every pack's tools listed directly, instead of just this one's:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "pipeworx": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Both URLs reach the same gateway and the same 1863+ data sources. The only difference is which pack's tools are listed directly; ask_pipeworx reaches all of them from either one.

No MCP client? Call it over HTTP

curl -X POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/fdsn_stations \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"network":"IU","station":"ANMO","level":"channel","channel":"BH*"}'

No account needed for the first calls. Inspect any tool: GET https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/fdsn_stations. Find one: POST https://gateway.pipeworx.io/v1/tools/search_packs with {"query":"..."}.

Run it from npm

@pipeworx/mcp-earthscope-fdsn is a local stdio bridge to the Pipeworx gateway: your MCP client starts it with npx, and it forwards every call to the same https://gateway.pipeworx.io/earthscope-fdsn/mcp endpoint shown above. It needs network access; there is no offline mode.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "earthscope-fdsn": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@pipeworx/mcp-earthscope-fdsn"]
    }
  }
}

Without a key it calls anonymously, capped at 50 calls a day. A free account raises that to 200 a day: get a key at https://pipeworx.io/signup and add "env": { "PIPEWORX_API_KEY": "<your key>" } to the server entry. The key is sent as a Bearer token, the same way a hosted connection sends it, so calls are metered and billed exactly as they are there.

It lists only this pack's tools by default. Set PIPEWORX_META_TOOLS=1 to also list ask_pipeworx and the other gateway-wide tools.

Behind an HTTPS proxy: Node's built-in fetch does not read HTTPS_PROXY by default. Newer Node releases honour it when NODE_USE_ENV_PROXY=1 is set; check your Node version's documentation.

Using with ask_pipeworx

Instead of calling tools directly, you can ask questions in plain English — this works on the pack endpoint above as well as on the full gateway:

ask_pipeworx({ question: "your question about Earthscope Fdsn data" })

The gateway picks the right tool and fills the arguments automatically.

More

• Docs and guides
• pipeworx.io

License

MIT