Long Beach, MS Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 9.3 miles southeast of Long Beach, MS?
1.51 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 9.3 miles southeast of Long Beach, MS, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 15.1 feet over the last decade.
What "Long Beach" means on this page
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 30.24°N, 89.09°W. 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.
25 years at this rate
If 1.51 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 9.3 miles southeast of Long Beach, MS would retreat roughly 38 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
Where this fits nationally
Averaging 76 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 100% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.75 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 159 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: West Hampton Dunes, NY, 1171 miles away, ranks 313 of 1211 nationally for erosion, 0.46 ft/yr, 0.3x this stretch's rate. 1.5 miles away, Long Beach, MS is the nearest other measured stretch: severe erosion at 3.71 ft/yr.
One address near Long Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.