Long Beach, MS Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 10.2 miles south of Long Beach, MS
3.71 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 10.2 miles south of Long Beach, MS, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 37.1 feet over the last decade.
The grain of this number
Nothing here is parcel-level. USGS's raw transects run every few hundred feet along the shore; this page averages the ones nearest Long Beach, MS into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 30.22°N, 89.10°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 3.71 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 10.2 miles south of Long Beach, MS would retreat roughly 93 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
38 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.22 ft/yr. This segment ranks 74 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Bertsch-Oceanview, CA sits at national rank 384 for erosion (0.34 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 2096 miles from here. Long Beach, MS, 1.5 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading moderate erosion at 1.51 ft/yr.
Long Beach, MS on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.