Isla Vista, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.7 miles west of Isla Vista, CA
Nothing alarming measured 1.7 miles west of Isla Vista, 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.
The grain of this number
Isla Vista, CA is the nearest named place, 1.7 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: 34.42, -119.89. 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.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 76 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 89% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.16 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.1 ft/yr, would place it 654 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 1077 nationally for growth belongs to Florence, OR, 697 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.8 ft/yr. 1.7 miles up the coast, Goleta, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Isla Vista, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.