The phrase "a centimeter a year" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a slow or gradual change or growth rate over time, often in scientific or environmental contexts.
Example: "The glacier is retreating at a rate of a centimeter a year due to climate change."
Alternatives: "one centimeter annually" or "a centimeter per annum".
Where the material is weak enough, metal whiskers can grow up to 1 centimeter a year.
Because the TLS approach generally provides morphological information of the surface of a target object (Heritage and Large, 2009) and not for its internal structures, here we focus on the surficial deformation of the mud volcano, whose amount is on the order of centimeters in a year (Kusumoto et al. 2014).
You mention that the Moon is moving away, but it's moving at 3.8 centimeters a year.
They create these kind of long tubes, you can think of soda straws, all contained together in this bundle, growing two centimeters a year at my site.
The bacterium infects and kills Elkhorn coral at a rate of up to 10 centimeters, or nearly four inches, a day — far outpacing the coral's regrowth rate of just 10 centimeters a year.
As that happens (it happens so slowly we can't see it, except through geological time; it's on the order of centimeters a year that this process occurs) it produces faults -- tectonics -- that displace these old sediment layers, bring them to the surface, [so that] we can walk along a horizon that was deposited in a lake a million years ago, or two million years ago.
With the North American tectonic plate riding westward a few centimeters a year over top of the fixed mantle plume, he would have expected to see the two chambers, which sit within the plate, to be offset to the west of the plume.
While most estuaries collect sediment slowly--less than 2 centimeters per year--Oktay's team found that New York Harbor collects 5 or more centimeters a year.
