Emerging flux and coronal heating: Small-scale transient events in the low solar atmosphere

The key to understanding how plasma is accelerated and heated in the low solar atmosphere may well be found in our studies of small-scale transient events such as explosive events, blinkers and network flares. Although these phenomena. appear to have rather different properties from one another, they all appear to relate to small-scale reconnection events in the continually changing magnetic fields of the low atmosphere. We discuss the observational characteristics of these transient events and, in the light of new observations of the low-lying magnetic fields, discuss magnetic scenarios which may explain their properties. We then consider the impact of these events on the solar atmosphere.