Margate City, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.6 miles northeast of Margate City, NJ
The coast 0.6 miles northeast of Margate City, NJ is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.8 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 8 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
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 Margate City, NJ, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 39.34, -74.50. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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.
What 0.8 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.8 ft/yr accretion rate 0.6 miles northeast of Margate City, NJ for 25 years would add roughly 20 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 86 individual transects averaged together, 5% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.47 ft/yr. This segment ranks 1076 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 1161 nationally for growth belongs to Tiki Island, TX, 1343 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.15 ft/yr, 2.7x this stretch's rate. 1.6 miles up the coast, Longport, NJ shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Margate City, NJ on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.