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Abstract The goal of this case study was to describe characteristic features of abductive inquiry learning activities in the domain of earth science. Participants were undergraduate junior and senior students who were enrolled in an earth science education course offered for preservice secondary science teachers at a university in Korea. The undergraduate students conducted, as a course activity, earth scientific inquiry according to the Abductive Inquiry Model (AIM) to explain a typhoon's anomalous path. Data sources included students' presentation materials, written reports, and interviews with five selected participants. The data were analyzed qualitatively in collaboration with a practicing earth scientist. The findings of the study revealed the characteristics of students' inquiry performance in each phase of the AIM. During the exploration phase, the students investigated earth scientific phenomena with provided data and transformed the data into new forms to discover problems to be explained abductively. In the examination phase, the students activated and expanded their background knowledge to find appropriate rules for abductive inference. Furthermore, they created new rules, which contained hypothetical explanations for the phenomena in question. The selection phase provided the students with opportunities to evaluate their hypotheses with empirical and theoretical criteria and choose more plausible ones. Finally, in the explanation phase, the students provided genetic and narrative explanations using the hypotheses selected previously. Implications for science inquiry learning as well as relevant research were suggested. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 95: 409–430, 2011