  Over the past decade, Boozer has argued that three-dimensional (3D) magnetic
reconnection fundamentally differs from two-dimensional (2D) reconnection due
to the fact that the separation between any pair of neighboring field lines
almost always increases exponentially over distance in a 3D magnetic field.
According to Boozer, this feature makes 3D field-line mapping chaotic and
exponentially sensitive to small non-ideal effects; consequently, 3D
reconnection can occur without intense current sheets. We test Boozer's theory
via ideal and resistive reduced magnetohydrodynamic simulations of the
Boozer-Elder coronal loop model driven by sub-Alfvenic footpoint motions [A. H.
Boozer and T. Elder, Physics of Plasmas 28, 062303 (2021)]. Our simulation
results significantly differ from their predictions. The ideal simulation shows
that Boozer and Elder under-predict the intensity of current density due to
missing terms in their reduced model equations. Furthermore, resistive
simulations of varying Lundquist numbers show that the maximal current density
scales linearly rather than logarithmically with the Lundquist number.
