Ferndale, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 8.6 miles southwest of Ferndale, CA
0.56 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 8.6 miles southwest of Ferndale, CA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 5.6 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 Ferndale, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 40.50°N, 124.38°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.56 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 8.6 miles southwest of Ferndale, CA would retreat roughly 14 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
Averaging 94 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 96% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.56 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 283 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. For scale: Seaside Park, NJ, 2617 miles away, ranks 248 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.66 ft/yr, 1.2x this stretch's rate. 2 miles up the coast, Ferndale, CA shows 0.97 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Ferndale: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.