Montara, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.2 miles west of Montara, CA?
1.2 miles west of Montara, CA: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
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 Montara, CA. Centered near 37.55°N, 122.51°W. 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.
How solid is this number
42 transects feed this segment's number; 74% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.31 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.1 ft/yr reading would land it 651 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Camp Pendleton South, CA, 407 miles away, ranks 1005 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.44 ft/yr. 2.7 miles away, Moss Beach, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.46 ft/yr.
One address near Montara: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.