Ocean City, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.7 miles southwest of Ocean City, NJ
0.7 miles southwest of Ocean City, NJ, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 1.02 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 10.2 feet over the last decade.
What "Ocean City" means on this page
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 Ocean City, NJ. Centered near 39.26°N, 74.61°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 1.02 ft/yr accretion rate 0.7 miles southwest of Ocean City, NJ for 25 years would add roughly 26 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 75 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 0% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.68 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1110 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Coronado, CA sits at national rank 1158 for growth (2.04 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2402 miles from here. 1.8 miles up the coast, Ocean City, NJ shows 2.2 ft/yr of accreting.
Ocean City, NJ on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.