Bolivar Peninsula, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 1.9 miles northeast of Bolivar Peninsula, TX
0.73 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 1.9 miles northeast of Bolivar Peninsula, TX, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 7.3 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Bolivar Peninsula, TX into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 29.51°N, 94.55°W. Survey years: 2001, method LRR, from USGS's Gulf of Mexico shoreline-change assessment. That's how current the data is here, real, but not a live feed, since a shoreline survey is a major undertaking, not an annual check-in.
25 years at this rate
If 0.73 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1.9 miles northeast of Bolivar Peninsula, TX would retreat roughly 18 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 106 individual transects averaged together, 100% of which measured erosion rather than growth. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.54 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 237 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Mokuleia, HI, 3960 miles away, ranks 393 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.33 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. Bolivar Peninsula, TX, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading moderate erosion at 1.29 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Bolivar Peninsula itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.