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 1679+ live data sources.

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

where seismometers are, what they record, who operates them, and when.

• fdsn_stations(network?, station?, channel?, level?, lat/lon/radius or bbox, …) —

earthquake catalogues: gfz (global rapid solutions), ingv (Italy), resif (France), koeri (Turkey).

• fdsnevents(datacenter?, starttime?, minmagnitude?, …) — regional agency

data centres hold waveform data for a channel and time window, with each centre's dataselect URL.

• fdsn_availability(network, station?, channel?, starttime?, endtime?) — which FDSN

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

, — regional catalogues.

• — station metadata.
• — federated holdings.
• , ,

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

the old host costs a redirect on every call, so the new one is used directly.

• service.iris.edu 301-redirects to service.earthscope.org. Both work;

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.

• EarthScope serves only station and dataselect under /fdsnws/. Their

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.

• **nodata=404 makes an empty result indistinguishable from a retired

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.

• Field names differ between level=station and level=channel, and the

blank-line-separated blocks, each opening with KEY=value service lines and then bare NET STA LOC CHA START END rows.

• fedcatalog answers in its own format=request dialect, not FDSN text:

convert (÷ 111.195).

• FDSN maxradius is in DEGREES of arc, not km. The tools take km and

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 — askpipeworx, discovertools, 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.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.