San Simeon, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 8.8 miles northwest of San Simeon, CA
Nothing alarming measured 8.8 miles northwest of San Simeon, 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
San Simeon, CA is the nearest named place, 8.8 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: 35.67, -121.28. The survey behind it runs to 1852-2016, in USGS's California assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 17 individual transects averaged together, 71% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.26 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.19 ft/yr, would place it 516 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. Rank 1110 nationally for growth belongs to Ocean City, NJ, 2543 miles from this stretch, measured at 1.02 ft/yr. 1.3 miles away, San Simeon, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
San Simeon, CA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.