With over half of the U.S. population living in coastal areas, it's no wonder that our shorelines have dramatically changed over time. Curious to see how development has altered the shoreline near you? With NOAA's Historical Shoreline Survey Viewer, it's easy to access a large number of historical shoreline surveys conducted by NOAA and its predecessor organizations.

About 7,800 surveys—the earliest dating back to 1841—are available for viewing in Google Earth. In addition to overlaying a scanned image of the survey in Google Earth, the Viewer provides links to download: the original scan and metadata, the resulting extracted vector shoreline, and a descriptive report compiled by the survey team.



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