Mexico Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
What USGS measures 3.5 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL
3.5 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 2.02 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 20.2 feet over the last decade.
What this reading actually covers
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 29.98°N, 85.46°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
Holding the 2.02 ft/yr accretion rate 3.5 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL for 25 years would add roughly 51 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
Where this fits nationally
This reading comes from 85 individual transects averaged together, 0% of which measured erosion rather than growth. The published margin on this reading runs ±1.24 ft/yr. This segment ranks 1156 of 1211 measured US coastal segments, ordered from fastest erosion to fastest growth. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 1089 nationally for growth belongs to Long Beach, CA, 1928 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.89 ft/yr, 0.4x this stretch's rate. Mexico Beach, FL, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, reading accretion (beach growing) at 1.54 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just Mexico Beach itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.