Cape Meares, OR Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.2 miles south of Cape Meares, OR
1.2 miles south of Cape Meares, OR: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
The grain of this number
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Cape Meares, OR. Centered near 45.51°N, 123.95°W. Survey years: 2002-2011, method LRR, from USGS's Pacific Northwest 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.
How solid is this number
Averaging 68 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±2.54 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -2.23 ft/yr reading would land it 120 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2012-1008. Rank 1139 nationally for growth belongs to Santiago, WA, 125 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.48 ft/yr. Cape Meares, OR, 2.5 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Cape Meares itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.