Moss Landing, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 0.5 miles southwest of Moss Landing, CA?
0.5 miles southwest of Moss Landing, CA, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.27 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 2.7 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Moss Landing, CA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 36.80°N, 121.79°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
Holding the 0.27 ft/yr accretion rate 0.5 miles southwest of Moss Landing, CA for 25 years would add roughly 7 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 112 individual transects averaged together, 17% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.21 ft/yr either side. This segment ranks 958 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Ocean Park, WA, 684 miles away, ranks 1113 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.04 ft/yr, 3.9x this stretch's rate. Castroville, CA, 3.5 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Moss Landing, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.