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Magnetic reconnection can explosively release magnetic energy when opposingmagnetic fields merge and annihilate through a current sheet, driving plasmajets and accelerating non-thermal particle populations to high energy, inplasmas ranging from space and astrophysical to laboratory scales. Throughlaboratory experiments and spacecraft observations, significant experimentalprogress has been made in demonstrating how fast dissipation and reconnectionoccurs in narrow, kinetic-scale current sheets. However, a challenge has beento demonstrate what triggers reconnection and how it proceeds rapidly andefficiently as part of a global system much larger than these kinetic scales.Here we show experimentally the full development of a process where the currentsheet forms and then breaks up into multiple current-carrying structures at theion kinetic scale. The results are consistent with tearing of the currentsheet, however modified by collisionless kinetic ion effects, which leads to alarger growth rate and number of plasmoids than observed in previousexperiments or compared to predictions from standard tearing instability theoryand previous non-linear kinetic reconnection simulations. This effect willincrease the role of plasmoid instabilities in many natural reconnectionsystems and should be considered in triggering rapid reconnection in a broadrange of natural plasmas with collisionless, compressible flows, including atthe Earth's magnetosheath and magnetotail and at the heliopause, in accretiondisks, and in turbulent high-Mach-number collisionless shocks.

A novel kinetic mechanism for the onset of fast magnetic reconnection and plasmoid instabilities in collisionless plasmas