contains surfaces of tangential discontinuity, or current sheets. It is Parker’s conjecture that the continuous footpoint displacement of coronal magnetic field lines must lead to the development of such discontinuities as the field continuously tries to relax to its equilibrium state, and it is the dynamical interplay of energy accumulation via footpoint motion and the bursty dissipation in the forming current sheets which gives rise to the phenomenon of the high temperature solar corona, heated by the individual bursts of reconnection, or nanoflares.

What then does turbulence have to do with the nanoflare heating scenario? Parker himself strongly criticizes the use of the “t” word, the formation of the current sheets being due in his opinion to the “requirement for ultimate static balance of the Maxwell stresses”. But what better way is there to describe the nonlinear global dynamics of a magnetically dominated plasma in which the formation of an equilibrium state containing current sheets is the inevitable asymptotic state (once the photospheric driver is turned off)?

The striving of the global magnetic field toward a state containing current sheets must occur through local violations of the force-free condition, the induction of local flows, the collapse of the currents into 