Cambria, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.8 miles northwest of Cambria, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 1.8 miles northwest of Cambria, CA: 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.
What "Cambria" means on this page
Cambria, CA is the nearest named place, 1.8 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: 35.57, -121.11. 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.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 27 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.46 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.17 ft/yr, would place it 545 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 National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Rank 1113 nationally for growth belongs to Ocean Park, WA, 774 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.04 ft/yr. San Simeon, CA, 1.3 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Cambria itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.