Surf City, NJ Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 0.3 miles north of Surf City, NJ
The coast 0.3 miles north of Surf City, NJ has been retreating at a measured 1.52 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 15.2 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 Surf City, NJ. Centered near 39.67°N, 74.17°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
If 1.52 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 0.3 miles north of Surf City, NJ would retreat roughly 38 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 33 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.31 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 158 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 106 nationally for erosion belongs to Taylor Landing, TX, 1325 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.63 ft/yr, 1.7x this stretch's rate. 2 miles up the coast, Ship Bottom, NJ shows 1.18 ft/yr of eroding.
One address near Surf City: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.