Bliss Corner, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 7.3 miles southwest of Bliss Corner, MA?
0.18 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 7.3 miles southwest of Bliss Corner, MA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 1.8 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 Bliss Corner, MA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.51°N, 71.01°W. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
25 years at this rate
If 0.18 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 7.3 miles southwest of Bliss Corner, MA would retreat roughly 5 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
51 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.13 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 525 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 115 nationally for erosion belongs to Stowell, TX, 1535 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.3 ft/yr, many times over this stretch's own rate. 2.2 miles up the coast, Bliss Corner, MA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Bliss Corner: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.