Carmel Valley Village, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 16 miles southwest of Carmel Valley Village, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 16 miles southwest of Carmel Valley Village, 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 "Carmel Valley Village" means on this page
Carmel Valley Village, CA is the nearest named place, 16 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: 36.31, -121.89. Survey years: 1852-2016, method LRR, from USGS's California 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.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 61 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 72% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.33 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.25 ft/yr, would place it 447 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 1166 nationally for growth belongs to Brigantine, NJ, 2570 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.23 ft/yr. 2.2 miles up the coast, Carmel Valley Village, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Carmel Valley Village itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.