Laurel, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 0.8 miles southwest of Laurel, FL?
Nothing alarming measured 0.8 miles southwest of Laurel, FL: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
Laurel, FL is the nearest named place, 0.8 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 27.14, -82.47. USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment last surveyed this stretch through 2001, 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.
What backs this reading up
This reading comes from 79 individual transects averaged together, 0% of which measured erosion rather than growth. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.39 ft/yr either side. The unadjusted figure here, 0.16 ft/yr, would place it 895 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Ferndale, CA, 2547 miles away, ranks 953 of 1211 nationally for growth, 0.26 ft/yr. 1.9 miles away, Osprey, FL is the nearest other measured stretch: also no significant trend.
One address near Laurel: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.