Santa Cruz, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 3.9 miles west of Santa Cruz, CA?
Nothing alarming measured 3.9 miles west of Santa Cruz, 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.
What this reading actually covers
Santa Cruz, CA is the nearest named place, 3.9 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: 36.96, -122.10. USGS's California assessment last surveyed this stretch through 1852-2016, 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.
How solid is this number
29 transects feed this segment's number; 96% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.39 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, -0.3 ft/yr, would place it 406 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. For scale: Dover Beaches South, NJ, 2575 miles away, ranks 994 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.4 ft/yr. 1.9 miles away, Davenport, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Santa Cruz itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.