St. George Island, FL Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 1.4 miles northwest of St. George Island, FL?
Nothing alarming measured 1.4 miles northwest of St. George Island, FL: whatever shift USGS's transects picked up here is too small to call reliably one way or the other, which this site reports as "no significant trend" rather than forcing a direction.
The grain of this number
St. George Island, FL is the nearest named place, 1.4 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: 29.67, -84.91. 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 backs this reading up
Averaging 83 separate transects produced this segment's rate, with 31% individually reading as erosion, rather than relying on any single survey line. USGS's confidence interval here is ±0.18 ft/yr. The unadjusted figure here, 0.05 ft/yr, would place it 816 of 1211 if ranked directly - but an unreliable rank isn't a useful one, which is exactly why "no significant trend" is the headline instead. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. For scale: Ocean Park, WA, 2393 miles away, ranks 1113 of 1211 nationally for growth, 1.04 ft/yr. St. George Island, FL, 1.8 miles off, is the adjacent measured stretch, itself no significant trend.
One address near St. George Island: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.