Rockport, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 0.6 miles southeast of Rockport, MA?
Averaged across every transect USGS ran 0.6 miles southeast of Rockport, MA, the shoreline has been moving inland at 0.35 feet a year, a real measured rate, not a regional estimate applied to this stretch. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 3.5 feet over the last decade.
What "Rockport" means on this page
Rockport, MA is the nearest named place, 0.6 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: 42.63, -70.62. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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 0.35 ft/yr means over time
Run 0.6 miles southeast of Rockport, MA's 0.35 ft/yr rate forward 25 years and it implies about 9 feet of further retreat, assuming nothing changes, which is exactly the assumption a seawall or nourishment project exists to break.
Where this fits nationally
26 transects feed this segment's number; 96% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.32 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 373 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Point Reyes Station, CA, 2725 miles away, ranks 355 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.4 ft/yr, 1.1x this stretch's rate. 2.1 miles up the coast, Rockport, MA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Rockport itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.