Scotia, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 20.3 miles southwest of Scotia, CA
Nothing alarming measured 20.3 miles southwest of Scotia, 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
Scotia, CA is the nearest named place, 20.3 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: 40.25, -124.35. 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.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 121 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 56% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.33 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, -0.04 ft/yr, would place it 732 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: Manzanita, OR, 377 miles away, ranks 1133 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.28 ft/yr. 2.2 miles away, Shelter Cove, CA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Scotia itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.