Long Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.9 miles southeast of Long Beach, CA?
1.9 miles southeast of Long Beach, CA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.89 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 8.9 feet over the last decade.
What "Long Beach" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Long Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 33.76°N, 118.15°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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.89 ft/yr accretion rate 1.9 miles southeast of Long Beach, CA for 25 years would add roughly 22 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 98 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 3% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.56 ft/yr either side. This segment ranks 1089 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Hogans Corner, WA, 970 miles away, ranks 1205 of 1211 nationally for growth, 6.05 ft/yr, 6.8x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles up the coast, Long Beach, CA shows 1.31 ft/yr of accreting.
One address near Long Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.