USGS Earthquakes API — live & historical (no key)

Real-time and historical earthquakes worldwide from the USGS, behind a clean HTTP API (and MCP tool). Get the latest quakes from named feeds (last hour/day/week, magnitude ≥2.5/4.5, or "significant"), or query by magnitude, time range and location (a radius around any lat/lon). Clean flat rows — magnitude, place, time, coordinates, depth, tsunami flag. No API key. Pay per query.

• 🌎 Recent — latest quakes from USGS summary feeds (e.g. all_day, 2.5_week, significant_month).
• 🔎 Search — filter by min/max magnitude, start/end time, and a radius around a point.
• 🔢 Count — how many quakes match a filter (fast).
• 🌊 Each quake includes magnitude, place, ISO time, lon/lat, depth, tsunami flag and the USGS event URL.
• 💵 Pay per query · no key · official USGS data.

The use case it was built for

Monitoring dashboards, alerting, insurance/risk models, travel and news apps, and agents that need to answer "any big quakes near here recently?". This API gives clean, current seismic data with no key to manage.

Sample output (search, magnitude ≥5)

{
  "ok": true, "count": 2,
  "earthquakes": [
    { "id": "us7000…", "magnitude": 5.2, "place": "189 km SSW of Pelabuhanratu, Indonesia",
      "time": "2026-09-18T04:00:00.000Z", "longitude": 105.91, "latitude": -8.58, "depthKm": 10,
      "tsunami": false, "alert": null, "url": "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000…" }
  ]
}

How to use

• HTTP API (Standby): POST or GET /recent, /search, /count. GET / returns help. Example: GET /search?minMagnitude=6&start=2024-01-01.
• Normal run: pass { operation, ... }; results land in the dataset + key-value store.
• MCP tool: expose it to your agent via Apify's MCP server.

Input

• operation — recent · search · count.
• feed — (recent) a USGS summary feed.
• minMagnitude / maxMagnitude / start / end — (search) filters.
• lat / lon / radiusKm — (search) a radius search around a point.
• orderby / limit — sort and cap.

Pricing

Per query from $0.004 (down to $0.0015 on higher tiers). One call = one query (which can return up to 500 quakes).

Related Actors

• Open-Meteo Weather API — weather for the same geo/monitoring use cases.

FAQ

How real-time is it? USGS feeds update within minutes of an event.

Which feeds? Hour/day/week/month windows at magnitude thresholds (all, 2.5+, 4.5+) plus "significant".

Do I need a key? No.

Notes & limits

Data from USGS (earthquake.usgs.gov). Up to 500 quakes per call; use magnitude/time/location filters to focus.