Ferndale, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 13.5 miles southwest of Ferndale, CA
Nothing alarming measured 13.5 miles southwest of Ferndale, CA: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
What this reading actually covers
Ferndale, CA is the nearest named place, 13.5 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: 40.41, -124.39. 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 83 individual transects averaged together, 75% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.18 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.14 ft/yr, would place it 586 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Rank 969 nationally for growth belongs to Portsmouth, NH, 2725 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.32 ft/yr. 2 miles away, Ferndale, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.26 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Ferndale itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.