A two-step scenario for both solar flares and magnetospheric substorms: Short duration energy storage

What a good idea! Does the double-reconnection Dungey cycle have an analog in quadrupolar coronal fields? Well... in the Archivist's view, maybe. It is a common idea in this Archive. It would help, as noted, with the energetics problem, since the inherently bipolar field structure of CSHKP models really misses out on the decisive matter of energy storage.

      Still one must fault the solar side of this cartoon (on the right) because of the manner in which the fields lean towards each other to seek reconnective bliss. Why would they do that? One oddity in this paper is that the authors appeal to emerging flux, and then curiously describe its reconnection with existing field as a source of stress buildup. Why would they need that, given that emergence already adds stress? To their credit, the authors cannot deal with this question and explicitly leave it open, not even making a decisive choice about the geomagnetic mechanism.