Cheriton, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 10.7 miles southeast of Cheriton, VA?
Averaged across every transect USGS ran 10.7 miles southeast of Cheriton, VA, the shoreline has been moving inland at 5.55 feet a year, a real measured rate, not a regional estimate applied to this stretch. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 55.5 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Cheriton, VA is the nearest named place, 10.7 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: 37.18, -75.83. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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 5.55 ft/yr means over time
Run 10.7 miles southeast of Cheriton, VA's 5.55 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 139 feet of further retreat, assuming nothing changes, which is exactly the assumption a seawall or nourishment project exists to break.
Where this fits nationally
16 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±2.06 ft/yr. This segment ranks 48 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Muir Beach, CA, 2535 miles away, ranks 305 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.48 ft/yr, a small fraction of this stretch's own rate. Cheriton, VA, 1.7 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading severe erosion at 3.98 ft/yr.
One address near Cheriton: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.