Modes of convection in the magnetotail

The flow of plasma in the Earth’s magnetotail cannot reach a steady state, since adiabatic convection would lead to exceedingly high pressure of the associated magnetic flux tubes closer to the Earth, the so-called pressure catastrophe. The natural way to avoid the pressure catastrophe is to significantly reduce the flux tube volume by reconnection, and observations show a near-Earth reconnection line typically around 20–25 Earth radii down tail. Earthward flows from this reconnection line are rather bursty and typically seen outside of 10 Earth radii. At this point they are strongly braked by the here dominant dipolar magnetic field. The pressure gradients piled up by the flow lead to the substorm current wedge, and possibly other substorm phenomena observed in the Earth’s ionosphere. When more and more flux tubes are piled up, the dipolarization front moves tailward and finally shuts off near-Earth reconnection.