The talk provides a new perspective of the global bifurcation theory on the plane. The theory of planar bifurcations consists of three parts: local, nonlocal and global. It has become clear that the global theory of planar bifurcations has yet to be created.

New phenomena are related to appearance of the so called sparkling saddle connections discovered by Malta and Palis in 1981. The aim of the talk is to give an outline of the new theory and discuss numerous open problems. The main new results are the existence of an open set of structurally unstable families of planar vector fields and the existence of families having functional invariants (joint results with Kudryashov and Schurov). These results disprove a conjecture of Arnold from 1985.