North Wildwood, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.8 miles southwest of North Wildwood, NJ
0.8 miles southwest of North Wildwood, NJ, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 4.21 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 42.1 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
North Wildwood, NJ is the nearest named place, 0.8 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 39.00, -74.81. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
What 4.21 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 4.21 ft/yr accretion rate 0.8 miles southwest of North Wildwood, NJ for 25 years would add roughly 105 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 88 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 15% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.92 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1193. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Huntington Beach, CA, 2411 miles away, ranks 993 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.39 ft/yr, a small fraction of this stretch's own rate. Wildwood Crest, NJ, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading accretion (beach growing) at 3.33 ft/yr.
One address near North Wildwood: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.