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Earthquake feed API: recent quakes as JSON

Dashboards, travel agents and incident bots often just need to know whether the ground moved nearby recently. This is a small, filterable feed of USGS events.

The problem

USGS publishes real-time GeoJSON feeds, but they come in fixed buckets (past hour, day, week) and fixed magnitude floors, with all the geometry and metadata of each event. To answer "any magnitude 4.5 or higher within 300 km of Lisbon in the past three days?" you must pick the right feed, filter by time, compute distances and sort.

How /earthquakes answers it

GET /earthquakes accepts minMagnitude (default 4.5), hours (1-168, default 24) and, optionally, lat, lon and radiusKm (default 500). It picks the matching USGS feed, filters by time and distance, and returns events with time, magnitude, place, coordinates, depthKm, a tsunami flag, the USGS PAGER alert level when one exists, the number of felt reports and a link to the USGS event page. Without a location, results are sorted by magnitude, strongest first. With a location they are sorted by distance and include distanceKm. Up to 100 events are returned, and truncated tells you if there were more.

Request and response

Example: magnitude 5 and above in the past 72 hours, worldwide.

$ curl -i "https://skyfeed.imac2014ville.workers.dev/earthquakes?minMagnitude=5&hours=72"
HTTP/2 402
payment-required: eyJ4NDAyVmVyc2lvbiI6Mi4uLn0=   # base64 JSON: scheme "exact", network eip155:8453,
                                                  # asset USDC, amount 3000 (= $0.003)
# An x402 client signs the payment, then retries with a PAYMENT-SIGNATURE header.

The paid response (abridged to two events at the time of capture):

{
  "ok": true,
  "query": { "minMagnitude": 5, "hours": 72 },
  "count": 12,
  "earthquakes": [
    { "time": "2026-10-08T09:00:07.768Z", "magnitude": 6.3, "place": "102 km NE of Norsup, Vanuatu",
      "lat": -15.5411, "lon": 168.1889, "depthKm": 10, "tsunami": false, "alert": "green",
      "url": "https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000u0xi" },
    { "time": "2026-10-09T14:49:41.714Z", "magnitude": 5.9, "place": "west of Macquarie Island",
      "lat": -60.9758, "lon": 154.4619, "depthKm": 10, "tsunami": false, "alert": "green" }
  ],
  "source": "USGS Earthquake Hazards Program (public domain)"
}

JavaScript with @x402/fetch

import { wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig } from "@x402/fetch";
import { ExactEvmScheme } from "@x402/evm";
import { privateKeyToAccount } from "viem/accounts";

const signer = privateKeyToAccount(process.env.PRIVATE_KEY); // wallet holding USDC on Base
const pay = wrapFetchWithPaymentFromConfig(fetch, {
  schemes: [{ network: "eip155:8453", client: new ExactEvmScheme(signer) }],
});
const res = await pay("https://skyfeed.imac2014ville.workers.dev/earthquakes?minMagnitude=4&hours=72&lat=38.72&lon=-9.14&radiusKm=300");
const { count, earthquakes } = await res.json();
if (count) console.log(earthquakes[0].place, earthquakes[0].magnitude, earthquakes[0].distanceKm);

Pricing

/earthquakes costs $0.003 per call. Planning a trip? /travel-check bundles weather, holidays and nearby quakes for $0.01. There is no API key and no account: each request is paid in USDC on Base over x402. Malformed input returns 400 and failed lookups return a non-2xx status, so those are not charged.

Limitations

More guides

SkyFeed overview/openapi.jsonllms.txt

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