Moss Beach, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.6 miles west of Moss Beach, CA
0.46 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 0.6 miles west of Moss Beach, CA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 4.6 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Moss Beach, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 37.51°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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.46 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 0.6 miles west of Moss Beach, CA would retreat roughly 12 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 23 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.2 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 320. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: East Quogue, NY, 2649 miles away, ranks 395 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.32 ft/yr, 0.7x this stretch's rate. 2.7 miles up the coast, Montara, CA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Moss Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.