Seaside, CA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.4 miles northwest of Seaside, CA?
The coast 1.4 miles northwest of Seaside, CA has been retreating at a measured 0.77 feet a year, USGS's own long-term rate for this stretch, built from historical shoreline positions rather than a single survey. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 7.7 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Seaside, CA. Centered near 36.64°N, 121.83°W. Survey years: 1852-2016, method LRR, from USGS's California 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.77 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1.4 miles northwest of Seaside, CA would retreat roughly 19 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
Averaging 79 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.34 ft/yr either side. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 233 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS National Shoreline Change data release (ScienceBase, DOI 10.5066/P94J0K7Z), Kratzmann 2024 / Data Report 1187. For scale: West Hampton Dunes, NY, 2627 miles away, ranks 269 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.6 ft/yr, 0.8x this stretch's rate. 1.9 miles up the coast, Marina, CA shows 0.94 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Seaside: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.