The Gulf of Mexico is the eleventh largest surface water body on Earth. A western arm of the Atlantic Ocean, it is an ocean basin mostly surrounded by the land, including the USA, Mexico and the island of Cuba. It is bounded on the northeast, north and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the USA, on the southwest and south by Mexico, and on the southeast by Cuba. The shape of its basin is approximately ovate and with a width of about 1500 kilometers; the basin is largely filled with sedimentary rocks and debris. It is connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Florida Straits that run between the USA and Cuba, and with the Caribbean Sea, connected by the Yucatan Channel between Mexico and Cuba. With this thin neck connection to the Atlantic, the gulf experiences quite small tidal ranges. The gulf basin is approximately1.6 million km², with virtually half in shallow intertidal waters. At its deepest reaches a depth of 4384 meters at a point known as the Sigsbee Deep, a jagged trough exceeding 550 km in length. The Gulf of Mexico contains a water volume of about 660 quadrillion gallons.

The United States portion of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) region extends from the Florida Keys westward to the southern tip of Texas, following the coastline of five states. The combined coastline of these states totals over 47,000 miles (when including the shores of all barrier islands, wetlands, inland bays, and inland bodies of water). The Gulf of Mexico has an area of approximately 580,000 square miles, contains an approximate 584,000 cubic miles of water, and has an average depth of 5,299 feet (Nipper et al., 2008).
This article provides a snapshot of the most current data available and is intended to highlight a variety of socioeconomic and environmental attributes of the GOM region. Economic activities are not necessarily ocean or coastal dependent, but serve the residents of and visitors to these coastal areas. The 2005 hurricane season had a tremendous impact on the Gulf of Mexico’s communities, economy, and ecology, and the data in this article reflect this impact.

Throughout this article, data are presented at several levels of geography: region, state, and coastal county. For the purposes of this report, GOM coastal counties were chosen to represent what is hereafter referred to as the “Gulf Coast Region.” To be included as “coastal,” one of the following criteria must be met: (1) at a minimum, 15% of the county’s total land area is located within a coastal watershed or (2) a portion of or an entire county accounts for at least 15% of a U.S. Geological Survey coastal cataloging unit. The Gulf Coast Region contains a total of 141 coastal counties across the five U.S. Gulf States. [READ MORE]