Long Beach, WA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.6 miles north of Long Beach, WA
2.6 miles north of Long Beach, WA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 5.37 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 53.7 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 Long Beach, WA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 46.40°N, 124.05°W. USGS's Pacific Northwest assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2002-2011, 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
Holding the 5.37 ft/yr accretion rate 2.6 miles north of Long Beach, WA for 25 years would add roughly 134 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
109 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.58 ft/yr. This segment ranks 1202 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2012-1008. Rank 1128 nationally for growth belongs to Westport, WA, 34 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.25 ft/yr, 0.2x this stretch's rate. 3.4 miles away, Ocean Park, WA is the nearest other measured stretch: accretion (beach growing) at 2.86 ft/yr.
One address near Long Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.