Carlsbad, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.6 miles west of Carlsbad, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 2.6 miles west of Carlsbad, 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 this reading actually covers
Carlsbad, CA is the nearest named place, 2.6 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: 33.12, -117.33. USGS's California assessment last surveyed this stretch through 1852-2016, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
How solid is this number
23 transects feed this segment's number; 70% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.09 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.04 ft/yr, would place it 737 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 1082 nationally for growth belongs to Gardiner, OR, 823 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.82 ft/yr. 1.8 miles up the coast, Carlsbad, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Carlsbad: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.