Eastville, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 9.8 miles east of Eastville, VA?
4.34 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 9.8 miles east of Eastville, VA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 43.4 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 Eastville, VA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 37.32°N, 75.77°W. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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
If 4.34 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 9.8 miles east of Eastville, VA would retreat roughly 109 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 29 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±1.11 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 65 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. West Ocean City, MD sits at national rank 85 for erosion (3.43 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 75 miles from here. 2.2 miles up the coast, Eastville, VA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Eastville, VA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.