Mexico Beach, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 5.8 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL
5.8 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL, the coast is advancing, not retreating, at a measured 2.91 feet a year, sediment accumulating faster than any erosion USGS recorded here. At that rate, the shoreline has gained roughly 29.1 feet over the last decade.
What "Mexico Beach" means on this page
Mexico Beach, FL is the nearest named place, 5.8 miles away, to a ~3.5-mile stretch of coast USGS has surveyed - the reading below covers that whole stretch, not a single property in it. Segment center: 29.99, -85.49. 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.
What 2.91 ft/yr means over time
Holding the 2.91 ft/yr accretion rate 5.8 miles northwest of Mexico Beach, FL for 25 years would add roughly 73 feet of shoreline, again assuming nothing about the local sediment supply changes.
What backs this reading up
113 transects feed this segment's number; 29% of them individually measured retreat. The published margin on this reading runs ±2.26 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 1181 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: South Padre Island, TX, 762 miles away, ranks 1138 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.46 ft/yr, 0.5x this stretch's rate. 2.3 miles up the coast, Mexico Beach, FL shows 2.02 ft/yr of accreting.
Mexico Beach, FL on the source map: try the Coastal Change Hazards Portal, zoomable well past this page's ~3.5-mile grain.