Soil magnetic susceptibility measurements for characterising heavy metal patterns in industrial areas (Chapt.3).

The development of innovative monitoring strategies, able to provide detailed information on temporal and spatial evolution of contaminants in superficial soil, combining fast, not invasive and low cost acquisition procedures for in situ monitoring pollution, is a crucial task for environmental research. In this context, electromagnetic parameter measurements represent suitable tools for identifying innovative experimental procedures. Particularly, magnetic susceptibility measurements of superficial soil may be used as a simple, rapid, cheap and non-destructive proxy variable to evaluate heavy metal patterns in industrial, urban and agricultural areas. We developed an experimental procedure to carry out field surveys for characterizing heavy metal patterns in superficial soil. This procedure is based on in situ soil magnetic susceptibility measurements supported by analytical determinations of metal concentrations. The well defined experimental protocol allows to reduce intrinsic environmental biases and to standardize the measurement procedure making simpler data interpretation. In this chapter we present a review of case studies concerning the characterization of contamination patterns in different industrial areas of Basilicata region in Southern Italy. Basilicata is an inner region, rather unpolluted, in which the main land use is agriculture The investigated sites show different geomorphologic and anthropogenic features, so they represent optimal sites for studying the potentiality of this kind of approach in different environmental conditions.