Modest Town, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 2.7 miles east of Modest Town, VA
The coast 2.7 miles east of Modest Town, VA has been retreating at a measured 3.63 feet a year, USGS's own long-term rate for this stretch, built from historical shoreline positions rather than a single survey. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 36.3 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Modest Town, VA. Centered near 37.81°N, 75.51°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 3.63 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 2.7 miles east of Modest Town, VA would retreat roughly 91 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 74 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.08 ft/yr. This segment ranks 78 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Sargent, TX, 1310 miles away, ranks 63 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 4.4 ft/yr, 1.2x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles away, Modest Town, VA is the nearest other measured stretch: moderate erosion at 2.05 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Modest Town itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.