Inverness, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 4.6 miles southwest of Inverness, CA?
The coast 4.6 miles southwest of Inverness, 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.
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 Inverness, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 38.03°N, 122.90°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.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 78 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 65% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.39 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.09 ft/yr reading would land it 665 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. Channel Islands Beach, CA sits at national rank 1106 for growth (0.99 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 336 miles from here. Inverness, CA, 1.4 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Inverness: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.