Chincoteague, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 5 miles south of Chincoteague, VA
5 miles south of Chincoteague, VA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 11.04 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 110.4 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
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 Chincoteague, VA. Centered near 37.88°N, 75.39°W. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, 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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 11.04 ft/yr accretion rate 5 miles south of Chincoteague, VA for 25 years would add roughly 276 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
27 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±9.75 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1210 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 942 nationally for growth belongs to Carpinteria, CA, 2448 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.23 ft/yr, a small fraction of this stretch's own rate. 1.3 miles away, Chincoteague, VA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Chincoteague: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.