Airborne EM Surveys Applied to Industrial Land- use Legacy Assessments in the UK

Recent high-resolution airborne EM surveys in the UK have identified previously unknown, non-geological, highly conductive environments in the near-surface. The surveys have covered a wide range of land-use contexts many of which have several centuries of industrial activities. Two case studies from southern Scotland are used to demonstrate the magnitude and scale of the high conductivity zones that may be encountered. The examples indicate that some of the most complex subsurface flow paths arise in the case of areas associated with coal extraction; here near-surface shafts and adits connect with shallow worked seams many of which are ancient and lost from modern records