The Santo André lagoon is located on the southern west coast of Portugal, about 80 km south of Lisbon. Although the beach barrier separating the lagoon from the open sea was occasionally breached in the past and has artificially been opened on an annual basis for the last decades, the lagoon still represents an appropriate geo-bio-archive for reconstructing the Holocene palaeoenvironmental evolution. For this purpose, a 10-m-long sediment core was taken from the centre of the lagoon by using a floating platform. Sedimentological, geochemical and micropalaeontological analyses were performed in order to unravel past sedimentological, environmental and climatic conditions. Due to the lagoon's exposure to storms from the Atlantic and possible tsunamis triggered by earthquakes along the Eurasian-African plate boundary south of Portugal, it is of high interest to identify short-term high energy events that might have crossed or breached the shielding barrier, leaving their footprint in the sedimentary record of the lagoon.

The sediment core archived the palaeoenvironmental evolution of the Santo André lagoon for at least the last eight millennia. The sandy deposits of the core's lowermost part most likely represent a former coastal flood plain that developed when the postglacial marine transgression had reached the area. The continued sea-level rise deposited alternating layers which indicate varying environmental conditions, characterized by peat growth, stagnant-water areas, as well as disconnections from and reconnections with the open sea. Since approximately 5000 BP, the longshore transport had formed a beach barrier, separating the marine embayment from the open sea and creating a lagoon. In addition, four sudden significant marine inundations between ~8500 and 6000 BP are indicated by the sedimentary and macrofaunal analyses. Two of these layers can be correlated to extreme wave events (unit B-II), while for the other two layers an ingression caused by sea-level rise or extreme wave events remains debatable.

圣安德烈泻湖位于葡萄牙西南海岸，距里斯本以南约80公里。尽管过去偶尔会突破将泻湖与公海分隔开的海滩屏障，并且在过去的几十年中每年都人工开放，但泻湖仍然是重建全新世古环境演化的合适的地球生物档案。为此，通过使用浮动平台从泻湖中心获取了10米长的沉积物芯。进行了沉积学，地球化学和微古生物学分析，以揭示过去的沉积学，环境和气候条件。由于泻湖暴露于来自大西洋的风暴，并且可能由于葡萄牙南部的欧亚-非洲板块边界发生地震而引发海啸，

沉积岩心至少在最后八千年里记录了圣安德烈泻湖的古环境演化。岩心最下部的沙质沉积物最有可能代表一个前沿海洪泛平原，该区域是在冰期后海侵入侵该地区时形成的。持续的海平面上升沉积交替的层，表明环境条件各不相同，其特征是泥炭生长，停滞的水域以及与公海的断开连接和与公海的重新连接。自从大约5,000 BP以来，沿岸运输形成了一个海滩屏障，将海洋圈养与公海分隔开来，形成了一个泻湖。此外，沉积和宏观动物分析表明在约8500至6000 BP之间出现了4次突然的重大海洋淹没。