South Padre Island, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Shoreline change 14.8 miles north of South Padre Island, TX
3.26 feet a year: that is the measured retreat rate USGS's transects show for the coast 14.8 miles north of South Padre Island, TX, averaged across the full historical record surveyed here. At that rate, the shoreline has lost roughly 32.6 feet over the last decade.
What "South Padre Island" 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 South Padre Island, TX into one ~3.5-mile reading rather than picking a single arbitrary line to represent the area. Centered near 26.33°N, 97.22°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 3.26 ft/yr holds for the next 25 years, the coast 14.8 miles north of South Padre Island, TX would retreat roughly 82 more feet, a projection, not a certainty: erosion rates shift with storms, sediment supply and any armoring built in the meantime.
What backs this reading up
17 transects feed this segment's number; 100% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±1.71 ft/yr. Among the 1211 US coastal segments with a measurable trend, this one ranks 89 for erosion, 1 being the fastest-retreating coast in the dataset. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Rank 415 nationally for erosion belongs to Montauk, NY, 1765 miles from this stretch, measured at 0.28 ft/yr, a small fraction of this stretch's own rate. 1.8 miles away, South Padre Island, TX is the nearest other measured stretch: severe erosion at 3.17 ft/yr.
Not this whole stretch, just South Padre Island itself: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal is USGS's own live version of this data.