Stone Harbor, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.2 miles north of Stone Harbor, NJ?
The coast 1.2 miles north of Stone Harbor, NJ is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.73 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 7.3 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Stone Harbor, NJ into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 39.06°N, 74.76°W. USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2007-2009, 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.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 0.73 ft/yr accretion rate 1.2 miles north of Stone Harbor, NJ for 25 years would add roughly 18 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
Averaging 90 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 23% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.63 ft/yr. This segment ranks 1069 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 1190 nationally for growth belongs to Copalis Beach, WA, 2511 miles from this stretch, measured at 3.87 ft/yr, 5.3x this stretch's rate. 1.6 miles up the coast, Stone Harbor, NJ shows the same lack of a significant trend.
One address near Stone Harbor: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.