Channel Islands Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding right at Channel Islands Beach, CA?
The coast right at Channel Islands Beach, CA is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.99 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 9.9 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 Channel Islands Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 34.17°N, 119.23°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.99 ft/yr accretion rate right at Channel Islands Beach, CA for 25 years would add roughly 25 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 42 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 0% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.51 ft/yr either side. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1106. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Rank 953 nationally for growth belongs to Ferndale, CA, 514 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.26 ft/yr, 0.3x this stretch's rate. 2.5 miles away, Oxnard, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.86 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Channel Islands Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.