North Scituate, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 3.4 miles northwest of North Scituate, MA?
The coast 3.4 miles northwest of North Scituate, MA shows no statistically significant trend either way. USGS's transects measured a rate here, but it's smaller than the survey's own margin of error for this stretch, so calling it "eroding" or "growing" would overstate what the data actually shows.
What "North Scituate" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest North Scituate, MA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 42.25°N, 70.81°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.
How solid is this number
Averaging 15 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.25 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -0.08 ft/yr reading would land it 671 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Bertsch-Oceanview, CA sits at national rank 1001 for growth (0.41 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2694 miles from here. Hingham, MA, 2.2 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading slight erosion at 0.15 ft/yr.
One address near North Scituate: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.