Virginia Beach, VA Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 9.4 miles southeast of Virginia Beach, VA
2.07 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 9.4 miles southeast of Virginia Beach, VA, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 20.7 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 Virginia Beach, VA into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 36.67°N, 75.93°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 2.07 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 9.4 miles southeast of Virginia Beach, VA would retreat roughly 52 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 21 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.17 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 132 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2010-1119. Rank 225 nationally for erosion belongs to Shelter Cove, CA, 2583 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.79 ft/yr, 0.4x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles away, Virginia Beach, VA is the nearest other measured stretch: slight erosion at 0.93 ft/yr.
Virginia Beach, VA on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.