McKinleyville, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.6 miles northwest of McKinleyville, CA
Nothing alarming measured 2.6 miles northwest of McKinleyville, CA: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
McKinleyville, CA is the nearest named place, 2.6 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 40.97, -124.12. 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.
How solid is this number
28 transects feed this segment's number; 71% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.82 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.28 ft/yr, would place it 417 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 958 nationally for growth belongs to Moss Landing, CA, 314 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.27 ft/yr. McKinleyville, CA, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just McKinleyville itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.