Orick, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 5.3 miles north of Orick, CA
Unusual good news for this stretch: the shoreline 5.3 miles north of Orick, CA has grown by a measured 1.26 feet a year on average, per USGS's long-term transect data for this section. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 12.6 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
USGS surveys the coast in transects spaced a few hundred feet apart; this page groups the nearest ones into a single ~3.5-mile reading for the stretch closest to Orick, CA, rather than showing one arbitrary line. Segment center: 41.37, -124.07. 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.
What 1.26 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 1.26 ft/yr accretion rate 5.3 miles north of Orick, CA for 25 years would add roughly 32 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
34 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.4 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1130. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: Westport, WA, 381 miles away, ranks 1128 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.25 ft/yr, 1.0x this stretch's rate. Orick, CA, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Orick itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.