Pacific Grove, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.6 miles southwest of Pacific Grove, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 1.6 miles southwest of Pacific Grove, CA: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
Pacific Grove, CA is the nearest named place, 1.6 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: 36.61, -121.95. 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.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 36 individual transects averaged together, 90% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.27 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.22 ft/yr, would place it 487 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. Saco, ME sits at national rank 962 for growth (0.3 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2724 miles from here. Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, 4.4 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Pacific Grove, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.