Mexico Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 3.1 miles east of Mexico Beach, FL
3.1 miles east of Mexico Beach, FL, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 0.47 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 4.7 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 Mexico Beach, FL into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 29.94°N, 85.36°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 0.47 ft/yr accretion rate 3.1 miles east of Mexico Beach, FL for 25 years would add roughly 12 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
How solid is this number
57 transects feed this segment's number; 0% of them individually measured retreat. Uncertainty on this specific number: 0.21 ft/yr either side. Sorted from fastest erosion to fastest growth across all 1211 measured segments nationally, this one lands at 1015. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Oak Beach, NY, 1003 miles away, ranks 1189 of 1211 nationally for growth, 3.79 ft/yr, 8.1x this stretch's rate. 1.7 miles away, Mexico Beach, FL is the nearest other measured stretch: slight accretion (beach growing) at 0.6 ft/yr.
One address near Mexico Beach: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.