Usgs Critical Deposits MCP server

@pipeworx/usgs-critical-deposits

USGS's "Critical mineral deposits of the United States" (ver. 3.0, September

each classified by mineral system and deposit type, with production history, resource/reserve figures and references, compiled from MRDS, ARDF and USMIN plus industry reports and the literature. Distinct from usgs-mrdata (raw MRDS occurrences, no curated critical-mineral resource/reference compilation) and usgs-mineral-commodities (national production/trade summaries, no per-deposit records).

1. — 1,271 documented mineral deposits across 41 states and Puerto Rico,

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1764+ live data sources. This is an independent, unofficial integration — not affiliated with, endorsed by, or published by the upstream provider.

Tools

critical mineral/commodity (e.g. "lithium", "cobalt", "ree"), US state or territory abbreviation, and/or a bounding box. Returns each deposit's id, name, state, coordinates, minerals, deposit type and resource figures. An unrecognized commodity returns found: false plus the full list of commodities this dataset actually has deposits for (see "Commodity vocabulary" below).

• usgscmddeposits_search(commodity?, state?, bbox?, limit?) — search by

deposit type, mineral system, production history, resource/reserve figures, references, a link to the underlying MRDS/ARDF/USMIN record, and the release version/DOI.

• usgscmddeposit_detail(id) — one deposit's full record: minerals,

Auth

Keyless.

Data sources

— the live ArcGIS FeatureServer this pack proxies per request.

item 6464de5bd34ec179a83d9e6c), "Critical mineral deposits of the United States (ver. 3.0, September 2026)". FGDC metadata revision date 2026-09-09; USGS's public announcement of the update is dated 2026-09-29.

• — the data release itself (ScienceBase

Why this proxies live rather than baking a table

The release also ships a download-only Excel/shapefile bundle, but USGS also stands up the identical table as a keyless ArcGIS FeatureServer (verified live 2026-10-08) — so, unlike usgs-mineral-commodities (genuinely file-only), this is a live-call-per-request proxy, not a mirror, and needs no reuse grant under root CLAUDE.md's "PROXYING is not REDISTRIBUTING". No KV bake, no module-scope data table.

The upstream is measurably flaky

Measured live 2026-10-08: the exact same unmodified query (where=1=1& outFields=fid&resultRecordCount=3) returned HTTP 502 on six consecutive attempts over ~45 seconds, then HTTP 200 on the next attempt with nothing changed on this end — this is the upstream ArcGIS hosting infrastructure hiccuping, not a malformed request. Every call in this pack throws loudly on a non-2xx status, a non-JSON body, or an ArcGIS-shaped {"error": {...}} response, naming the upstream status — never degrading into found: false or an empty deposits list, which would be indistinguishable from a real zero-result query. See src/index.test.ts for the pinned contract.

Commodity vocabulary

The CritMin field in the underlying dataset is open text, comma-separated, and mixes individual elements with USGS's own group shorthand ("ree", "pge") and a few raw multi-word entries ("palladium rhenium", "tantalum tin") — it is not a clean one-token-per-commodity field, and it is not the same list as USGS's press-release count of "59 critical minerals" (the 2025 List of Critical Minerals, 60 commodities, minus metallurgical coal, which this compilation does not address). The two numbers differ because several of the 60 named commodities have zero documented deposits in this release, and because grouped tokens (ree, pge) stand in for multiple individually-named elements on the official list.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.