Dams and the Deep Earth: The 1967 Koyna Earthquake and Human Agency in the Anthropocene

Abstract

On 11 December 1967, a large earthquake devastated the village of Koynanagar in Maharashtra, western India. Many blamed the new Koyna hydroelectric dam nearby. Prompting international inquests, Koyna became perhaps the world’s most famous case of reservoir-induced seismicity, a novel type of earthquake triggered by human activities. We use the dam’s history to explore the emergent consciousness of human geophysical agency that characterizes the Anthropocene, the putative new epoch when humans have become a planetary-scale ‘force of Nature’. The dam was explicitly designed as a geotechnical assemblage, a blending of technology, mountain topography, monsoon waters and rock. Striking a supposedly stable region, the 1967 earthquake revealed the more-than-human unpredictability of this composite. Scientists began to trace a radically new form of human agency at work, which owed its effects to complex chains of causality that extended deep underground and backward into deep history. Yet there was remarkably little policy fallout. Dam construction only accelerated in seismically active areas. The debates over reservoir-induced seismicity showed that human geotechnical agency could be read in diametrically opposed ways: as a source of anxiety or hubris, or simply irrelevant to practical policy making, thereby presaging today’s debates over human planetary stewardship in the Anthropocene.