As a kind of geophysical method, the principle of transient electromagnetic method (TEM) observes the second- ary vortex ？eld in the gap of the primary ？eld, which is applied to the investigation of resources and environmen- tal engineering survey. In order to realize the rapid and precise detection of the deep targets (due to its relative great detection depth and high accuracy), the short offset time-domain electromagnetic method (SOTEM) is pro- posed in this paper. In addition, its feasibility, observation and interpretation techniques are researched. The re- sults show that SOTEM has the same near source detection capability as the central loop con？guration when choosing the step waveform, and as a result, the primary and secondary ？elds can be separated theoretically. The application has shown the effectiveness and superiority of SOTEM in the deep target exploration.