Provincetown, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 4.1 miles east of Provincetown, MA
0.4 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 4.1 miles east of Provincetown, MA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 4 feet over the last decade.
What "Provincetown" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Provincetown, MA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 42.05°N, 70.10°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 0.4 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 4.1 miles east of Provincetown, MA would retreat roughly 10 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 100 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 92% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.38 ft/yr. This segment ranks 348 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Grand Isle, LA sits at national rank 25 for erosion (8.92 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 1428 miles from here. 2.3 miles away, Provincetown, MA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.6 ft/yr.
One address near Provincetown: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.