Earthquake Grounding Data for AI Agents

Overview

Requests pull seismic records refreshed hourly from the United States Geological Survey. The endpoint outputs events from the previous hour with magnitudes, coordinates, and tsunami indicators, leaving alert levels null if unassigned. It also provides rolling 24-hour counts and peak magnitudes, while paid plans add the 24-hour average magnitude.

Live Test Earthquake Grounding Data for AI Agents Source →

The tool

Once your client is connected to the VerveContext server, this appears in its tool list as EarthquakeGroundingDataforAIAgents. It is read-only and open-world — it fetches and never mutates anything on your side — so most clients call it without asking you to confirm.

{
  "name": "EarthquakeGroundingDataforAIAgents",
  "arguments": {}
}

Connecting

One server URL covers every source in the catalog, including this one. Authorization is OAuth: the client opens a browser once, and there is no key to paste into a config file.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "vervecontext": {
      "url": "https://api.vervecontext.com/v1/mcp"
    }
  }
}

https://api.vervecontext.com/v1/mcp

Per-client setup — Claude, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT — is on the MCP setup page.

What the model gets back

The result carries a structuredContent object matching the tool's declared outputSchema, so a client reads fields without parsing prose. status is "ok" and error is null on success; a null field means the value was not available for that input, not that the call failed.

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{
  "status": "ok",
  "error": null,
  "data": {
    "earthquakes_LastUpdated": "2026-02-18T12:00:00.000Z",
    "earthquakes_LastHour": 9,
    "count24h": 187,
    "largestMagnitude24h": 5.2,
    "avgMagnitude24h": 1.84,
    "earthquakes": [
      {
        "mag": 3.4,
        "place": "153 km SSW of Channel Islands Beach, California",
        "time": 1765921110756,
        "felt": 1,
        "cdi": 2.2,
        "mmi": 2.538,
        "status": "reviewed",
        "tsunami": 0,
        "sig": 178,
        "net": "us",
        "types": ",dyfi,nearby-cities,origin,phase-data,scitech-link,shakemap,",
        "nst": 36,
        "dmin": 0.479,
        "rms": 0.65,
        "gap": 247,
        "magType": "ml",
        "type": "earthquake",
        "title": "M 3.4 - 153 km SSW of Channel Islands Beach, California",
        "coordinates": [
          -119.931,
          32.9103
        ]
      },
      {
        "mag": 2.25,
        "place": "6 km NW of The Geysers, CA",
        "time": 1765921522850,
        "status": "automatic",
        "tsunami": 0,
        "sig": 78,
        "net": "nc",
        "types": ",focal-mechanism,nearby-cities,origin,phase-data,",
        "nst": 54,
        "dmin": 0.01126,
        "rms": 0.05,
        "gap": 23,
        "magType": "md",
        "type": "earthquake",
        "title": "M 2.3 - 6 km NW of The Geysers, CA",
        "coordinates": [
          -122.792831,
          38.819332
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Response fields

Paths are relative to data. Premium fields are absent rather than zeroed on plans that do not include them, so check for presence instead of comparing to 0.

Why ground on it

A model can produce something that looks like this answer from its training data, and be confidently out of date or simply wrong. This source returns the current value in a shape you can check, which is the difference between an answer you can cite and one you have to hedge.

Point an evaluation at earthquakes_LastUpdated: it is the field most worth pinning a claim to, and it is either present and current or absent — never plausibly invented.

Failure modes

Errors come back as tool errors carrying a sentence the model can act on, not a bare status code. Error handling covers the full list.

A call costs 2 credits each time the tool actually runs; a model that reasons about the tool without calling it costs nothing.

Use cases

Emergency Alerting Systems

When a tremor occurs, disaster response platforms trigger push alerts based on magnitude, epicenter coordinates, and tsunami warning indicators.

Travel Safety Trackers

Trip planning apps display nearby seismic activity and citizen felt reports along travel routes to warn tourists of active tremors.

Infrastructure Risk Monitoring

To protect bridges and pipelines, civil engineering teams log seismic intensity metrics and epicenter proximity to schedule structural safety inspections.

Geoscience Educational Maps

Interactive classroom dashboards map live earthquake epicenters with magnitude summaries and felt reports straight from USGS records.

Other ways to use Earthquake Grounding Data for AI Agents

Set up Earthquake Grounding Data for AI Agents on VerveContext, or reach the same source a different way. Your VerveContext account and credits work on all of them — one key, one balance.

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