Atlantic Highlands, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.8 miles north of Atlantic Highlands, NJ
Nothing alarming measured 2.8 miles north of Atlantic Highlands, NJ: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
Atlantic Highlands, NJ is the nearest named place, 2.8 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 40.45, -74.00. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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.
How solid is this number
124 transects feed this segment's number; 21% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.35 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.76 ft/yr, would place it 1074 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 1166 nationally for growth belongs to Brigantine, NJ, 76 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.23 ft/yr. Highlands, NJ, 3.4 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Atlantic Highlands: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.