Virginia Beach, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 3.2 miles east of Virginia Beach, VA?
0.65 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 3.2 miles east of Virginia Beach, VA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 6.5 feet over the last decade.
What "Virginia Beach" means on this page
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Virginia Beach, VA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 36.78°N, 75.97°W. The survey behind it runs to 2007-2009, in USGS's New England / Mid-Atlantic 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.
25 years at this rate
If 0.65 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 3.2 miles east of Virginia Beach, VA would retreat roughly 16 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 44 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.59 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 249. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. For scale: Big Lagoon, CA, 2570 miles away, ranks 246 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.68 ft/yr, 1.0x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles up the coast, Virginia Beach, VA shows 0.54 ft/yr of eroding.
Virginia Beach, VA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.