Mexico Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 2.2 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL
The coast 2.2 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL is actually gaining ground, not losing it: USGS's transects measure 1.54 feet of accretion a year here, sediment building up rather than washing away. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 15.4 feet over the last decade.
What "Mexico 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 Mexico Beach, FL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 29.97°N, 85.43°W. The survey behind it runs to 2001, in USGS's Gulf of Mexico assessment, using the LRR method. Shoreline surveys aren't repeated every year, so this is the most recent long-term measurement USGS has published for this coast, not a live reading.
25 years at this rate
Holding the 1.54 ft/yr accretion rate 2.2 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL for 25 years would add roughly 39 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
Averaging 12 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 0% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. The published margin on this reading runs ±0.34 ft/yr. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1142. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 1190 nationally for growth belongs to Copalis Beach, WA, 2372 miles from this stretch, measured at 3.87 ft/yr, 2.5x this stretch's rate. 1.8 miles up the coast, Mexico Beach, FL shows 2.02 ft/yr of accreting.
One address near Mexico Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.