We characterize dynamical instability of weak chaos as subexponential instability. We show that a one-dimensional, conservative, ergodic measure preserving map with subexponential instability has an infinite invariant measure, and then we present a generalized Lyapunov exponent to characterize subexponential instability. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3470091]