Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2009
A discontinuous change in the size of an attractor is the most easily observed type of global bifurcation. More generally, an explosion is a discontinuous change in the set of recurrent points. An explosion often results from heteroclinic and homoclinic tangency bifurcations. We prove that, for one-dimensional maps, explosions are generically the result of either tangency or saddle-node bifurcations. Furthermore, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for generic tangency bifurcations to lead to explosions.