Crescent City, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.9 miles south of Crescent City, CA
Unusual good news for this stretch: the shoreline 0.9 miles south of Crescent City, CA has grown by a measured 1.27 feet a year on average, per USGS's long-term transect data for this section. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 12.7 feet over the last decade.
What "Crescent City" means on this page
Crescent City, CA is the nearest named place, 0.9 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: 41.75, -124.20. 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.
What 1.27 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 1.27 ft/yr accretion rate 0.9 miles south of Crescent City, CA for 25 years would add roughly 32 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 64 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 4% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.89 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1131 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Newport, OR sits at national rank 1121 for growth (1.16 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 200 miles from here. 2.3 miles up the coast, Bertsch-Oceanview, CA shows 0.41 ft/yr of accreting.
Not this whole stretch, just Crescent City itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.