Summary Recent studies have revealed important and versatile roles that Archaea play in a wide variety of environmental processes on Earth. In this study, we investigated the abundance and diversity of archaeal communities in lake water and a 5 m sediment core collected from Qinghai Lake on the Tibetan Plateau, north‐western China. An integrated approach was employed including geochemistry, quantitative polymerase chain reacti...

Summary Previous investigations of the salinity effects on the microbial community composition have largely been limited to dynamic estuaries and coastal solar salterns. In this study, the effects of salinity and mineralogy on microbial community composition was studied by using a 900‐cm sediment core collected from a stable, inland hypersaline lake, Lake Chaka, on the Tibetan Plateau, north‐western China. This core, spanning...