In the last two years, an international team comprising researchers from France and the ALS has developed new analytical capabilities that allow them to noninvasively peer into the heterogeneous world of soils and sediments and identify and quantify heavy metal contaminants at micrometer scales of resolution. The synergistic use of three powerful x-ray techniques—x-ray fluorescence (SXRF), diffraction (XRD), and absorption (XAFS)—allows the researchers to identify the molecular nature of the host mineral species and the trace metal's speciation, distribution, and coordination chemistry with micrometer spatial resolution. One of the difficulties in assessing the state of these metals is that the subsurface is extremely heterogeneous and becomes even more so at these scales, where heavy metals can exist as trace and major elements in mineral hosts. The researchers successfully applied their three-pronged approach to the speciation of nickel and zinc in a soil ferromanganese nodule using the microfocus capabilities of Beamlines 7.3.3 and 10.3.2.