Gulf Gate, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 1.4 miles southwest of Gulf Gate, FL
The coast 1.4 miles southwest of Gulf Gate, FL has been retreating at a measured 0.49 feet a year, USGS's own long-term rate for this stretch, built from historical shoreline positions rather than a single survey. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 4.9 feet over the last decade.
What "Gulf Gate" means on this page
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Gulf Gate, FL. Centered near 27.24°N, 82.52°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 0.49 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 1.4 miles southwest of Gulf Gate, FL would retreat roughly 12 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 69 individual transects averaged together, 88% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.33 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 300 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 127 nationally for erosion belongs to Edgartown, MA, 1186 miles from this stretch, measured at 2.13 ft/yr, 4.3x this stretch's rate. 2.2 miles up the coast, Siesta Key, FL shows 2.82 ft/yr of accreting.
Gulf Gate, FL on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.