The east lobe of Lake Bonney, a permanently ice‐covered lake in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, has a mid‐depth maximum N 2 O concentration of 43.3 [mol N L ‐1 (>700,000% saturation with respect to air), representing one of the highest concentrations reported for a natural aquatic system. δ 15 N and δ 18 O measurements indicate that this is the most isotopically depleted N 2 O yet observed in a natural environment (minimu...

Comparisons among patterns exhibited by functionally distinct genetic markers have been widely used to infer the impacts of demography and selection in structuring genetic variation in natural populations. However, such multilocus comparisons remain an indirect evaluation of selection at particular candidate loci; ideally, the identification of a candidate gene by comparative genetic methodologies should be complemented by fun...

Subglacial Lake Vostok is located ~4 km beneath the surface of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet and has been isolated from the atmosphere for ≫15 million yr. Concerns for environmental protection have prevented direct sampling of the lake water thus far. However, an ice core has been retrieved from above the lake in which the bottom ,85 m represents lake water that has accreted (i.e., frozen) to the bottom of the ice sheet. We mea...

Summary Ice that forms the bottom 18 m of a 308 m ice core drilled from the Guliya ice cap on the Qinghan‐Tibetan plateau in Western China is over 750 000 years old and is the oldest glacial ice known to date. Fourteen bacterial isolates have been recovered from samples of this ice from ∼296 m below the surface (mbs). Based on 16S rDNA sequences, these are members of the α‐ and β‐proteobacterial, actinobacterial and low‐G + C...

Lake Vostok, the largest subglacial lake in Antarctica, is separated from the surface by ≈ 4 km of glacial ice. It has been isolated from direct surface input for at least 420 000 years, and the possibility of a novel environment and ecosystem therefore exists. Lake Vostok water has not been sampled, but an ice core has been recovered that extends into the ice accreted below glacial ice by freezing of Lake Vostok water. Here,...