Virginia Beach, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 8.2 miles north of Virginia Beach, VA
The coast 8.2 miles north of Virginia Beach, VA is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 0.47 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 4.7 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Virginia Beach, VA is the nearest named place, 8.2 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 36.90, -76.01. 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.
What 0.47 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 0.47 ft/yr accretion rate 8.2 miles north of Virginia Beach, VA for 25 years would add roughly 12 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
This reading comes from 101 individual transects averaged together, 3% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.3 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1017. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Seal Beach, CA sits at national rank 1053 for growth (0.63 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2363 miles from here. 3.3 miles away, Virginia Beach, VA is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
Not this whole stretch, just Virginia Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.