The present paper presents a philosophical analysis of earth science, a discipline that has
received relatively little attention from philosophers of science. We focus on the question of
whether earth science can be reduced to allegedly more fundamental sciences, such as chemistry
or physics. In order to answer this question, we investigate the aims and methods of
earth science, the laws and theories used by earth scientists, and the nature of earth-scientific
explanation. Our analysis leads to the tentative conclusion that there are emergent phenomena
in earth science but that these may be reducible to physics. However, earth science does
not have irreducible laws, and the theories of earth science are typically hypotheses about
unobservable (past) events or generalised—but not universally valid—descriptions of
contingent processes. Unlike more fundamental sciences, earth science is characterised by
explanatory pluralism: earth scientists employ various forms of narrative explanations in
combination with causal explanations. The main reason is that earth-scientific explanations
are typically hampered by local underdetermination by the data to such an extent that
complete causal explanations are impossible in practice, if not in principl
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