Geotechnics shallow and detailed: is AEM up for the challenge?

Applied Geophysics to Engineering, Geotechnics and Environment is generally synonymous of shallow target, but, at the same time, it demands a detailed reconstruction of the subsurface. The question is: "Is the Airborne EM ready to accept this challenge?". Our answer is positive, based on experiences of some case studies, dealing with landslides, shallow geological investigation and so on. Indeed the applications of AEM to geotechnical issues are very few: Beard and Lutro [1] showed the case of an airborne prospect, by using not only EM, but also magnetic, radiometric and VLF data, for the planning of a railroad in Norway; Pfaffhuber et al. [2] used the AEM for the study of rock slides and tunnelling hazards in Norway again; several are the application of the method for environmental purposes, such as potential hazards at coal-waste impoundments [3] or waste site characterization [4, 5, 6, 7]. Other rare applications are focused on the supply of sands and gravels for engineering purposes [8], while the detection of lithologic distributions in alluvial aquifer, due to hydrogeological purposes, is more frequent [9, 10, 11].