Ferndale, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 4.5 miles northwest of Ferndale, CA
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 4.5 miles northwest of Ferndale, CA, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Ferndale, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 40.62, -124.32. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California 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.
What backs this reading up
10 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.44 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.42 ft/yr, would place it 1004 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. Kennebunkport, ME sits at national rank 933 for growth (0.22 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2724 miles from here. Ferndale, CA, 1.9 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Ferndale: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.