Sandwich, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 0.5 miles northeast of Sandwich, MA?
Nothing alarming measured 0.5 miles northeast of Sandwich, MA: 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.
What this reading actually covers
Sandwich, MA is the nearest named place, 0.5 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: 41.76, -70.49. 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.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 70 individual transects averaged together, 61% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.26 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.23 ft/yr, would place it 465 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 Open-File Report 2010-1119. Oxnard, CA sits at national rank 1086 for growth (0.86 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2670 miles from here. Sagamore, MA, 1.6 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
Sandwich, MA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.