Tiki Island, TX Coastal Erosion Rate
Is the coast eroding 7.9 miles east of Tiki Island, TX?
7.9 miles east of Tiki Island, TX: USGS's transects didn't pick up a trend here that beats the survey's own uncertainty. That's the majority case nationally, and for this stretch specifically it means the coast is holding, not that the data failed to find anything.
The grain of this number
This is a roughly 3.5-mile stretch of coast, not one address or parcel - USGS's own transects run every few hundred feet, but that's finer than any one property needs, so this page reports the stretch nearest Tiki Island, TX. Centered near 29.32°N, 94.79°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.
What backs this reading up
31 transects feed this segment's number; 90% of them individually measured retreat. USGS's confidence interval here is ±2.77 ft/yr. Taken at face value, this segment's raw -1.16 ft/yr reading would land it 184 of 1211 nationally - a number worth ignoring, since it's statistical noise rather than a real trend. Source: USGS Open-File Report 2004-1089. Port St. Joe, FL sits at national rank 1067 for growth (0.73 ft/yr), one reference point among the 1211 scored segments, 574 miles from here. 0.7 miles up the coast, Tiki Island, TX shows 2.15 ft/yr of accreting.
One address near Tiki Island: the Coastal Change Hazards Portal zooms past this stretch to the underlying map.