Bethany Beach, DE Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1 miles northwest of Bethany Beach, DE?
0.77 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 1 miles northwest of Bethany Beach, DE, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 7.7 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Bethany Beach, DE into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 38.55°N, 75.07°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.77 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1 miles northwest of Bethany Beach, DE would retreat roughly 19 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
Averaging 111 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.35 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 232. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Jamaica Beach, TX, 1313 miles away, ranks 266 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.6 ft/yr, 0.8x this stretch's rate. 2.4 miles away, Bethany Beach, DE is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.84 ft/yr.
One address near Bethany Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.