Los Osos, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 2.7 miles west of Los Osos, CA?
Good news, and an honest one: USGS's data can't distinguish this stretch, 2.7 miles west of Los Osos, CA, from a flat trend. Whatever small movement it measured here is statistical noise, not a reliable direction, so none is claimed.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Los Osos, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 35.31, -120.87. 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
This reading comes from 46 individual transects averaged together, 63% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.35 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.04 ft/yr, would place it 733 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 1200 nationally for growth belongs to Tokeland, WA, 808 miles from this stretch, measured at 5.19 ft/yr. Los Osos, CA, 1.3 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near Los Osos: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.