Albion, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.1 miles south of Albion, CA?
The coast 2.1 miles south of Albion, CA is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.3 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 3 feet over the last decade.
What "Albion" means on this page
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Albion, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 39.19, -123.76. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What 0.3 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.3 ft/yr accretion rate 2.1 miles south of Albion, CA for 25 years would add roughly 8 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 17 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 14% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.18 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 963 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Ocean City, NJ, 2598 miles away, ranks 1162 of 1211 nationally for growth, 2.2 ft/yr, 7.3x this stretch's rate. 5.6 miles away, Little River, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.17 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Albion itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.