So says a NASA press release dated July 24 of this year: "We discovered what makes the Northern Lights dance," said Dr. Vassilis Angelopoulos of the University of California, Los Angeles. Angelopoulos is the principal investigator for the Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms mission, or THEMIS.

Many people today agree that the substorm problem has indeed been solved. The problem is that they don’t all agree on the solution. In this journal club I will discuss substorms for the uninitiated, describe some of the theories for substorm onsets, and discuss some of the conclusions the people are drawing from recent observations. In addition I will present some of my own observations of substorm phenomena. I will attempt to show that while we are getting much closer, we really have not yet solved the problem.