Intermittency at onset of convection in a slowly rotating, self-gravitating spherical shell

I present a joint work with Guyard and Lauterbach [4] which shows the existence and stability of a robust heteroclinic cycle near onset of convection in a self-gravitating, slowly rotating spherical shell filled with a fluid. The consequence of this is the existence of a regime characterized by long periods of time spent near an axisymmetric steady-state followed by sudden bursts of "turbulent flow" which settles down to another axisymmetric state with fluid flow moving in the opposite direction to the previous one. The process repeats indefinitely but non-periodically.