Dillon Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 3.6 miles south of Dillon Beach, CA
The coast 3.6 miles south of Dillon Beach, CA shows no statistically significant trend either way. USGS's transects measured a rate here, but it's smaller than the survey's own margin of error for this stretch, so calling it "eroding" or "growing" would overstate what the data actually shows.
What "Dillon Beach" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Dillon Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 38.19°N, 122.96°W. 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
This reading comes from 47 individual transects averaged together, 30% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.4 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw 0.08 ft/yr reading would land it 839 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Point Lookout, NY, 2609 miles away, ranks 1194 of 1211 nationally for growth, 4.23 ft/yr. Dillon Beach, CA, 3.1 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.53 ft/yr.
One address near Dillon Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.