Manhattan Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.7 miles southeast of Manhattan Beach, CA
0.7 miles southeast of Manhattan Beach, CA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.58 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 5.8 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Manhattan Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 33.89°N, 118.42°W. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.58 ft/yr accretion rate 0.7 miles southeast of Manhattan Beach, CA for 25 years would add roughly 14 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
83 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.23 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1040 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Warrenton, OR, 898 miles away, ranks 1196 of 1211 nationally for growth, 4.64 ft/yr, 8.0x this stretch's rate. El Segundo, CA, 1.9 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading accretion (beach growing) at 1.04 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Manhattan Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.