Plymouth, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 0.9 miles east of Plymouth, MA
0.27 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 0.9 miles east of Plymouth, MA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 2.7 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Plymouth, MA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.96°N, 70.65°W. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, computing the rate with its LRR method. Other US regions were surveyed in different years, sometimes decades apart, so this page states its own rather than implying one national vintage.
25 years at this rate
If 0.27 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 0.9 miles east of Plymouth, MA would retreat roughly 7 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 92 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 80% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.23 ft/yr. This segment ranks 421 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Shelter Cove, CA, 2741 miles away, ranks 250 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.65 ft/yr, 2.4x this stretch's rate. 3.9 miles away, South Duxbury, MA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Plymouth itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.