Vineyard Haven, MA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 11 miles southwest of Vineyard Haven, MA
0.9 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 11 miles southwest of Vineyard Haven, MA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 9 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Vineyard Haven, MA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 41.34°N, 70.75°W. Survey years: 2007-2009, method LRR, from USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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 0.9 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 11 miles southwest of Vineyard Haven, MA would retreat roughly 23 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
72 transects feed this segment's number; 99% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.38 ft/yr. This segment ranks 212 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Greenbackville, VA, 332 miles away, ranks 322 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.45 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. 2 miles up the coast, Vineyard Haven, MA shows the same lack of a significant trend.
Vineyard Haven, MA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.