What would a magnetosphere polarity shift do to Earths Van Allen Belt?
The magnetic poles move all the time. There is a geologic record that shows it has happened many times in our past but not at regular intervals. Time between reversals can be 10000 yrs or a million years. However – we know that the magnetic field does not collapse in the process – if it did, there would be major extinctions that correlate with the geologic record for pole reversals – there is no correlation. The latest hypothesis is that the Earth’s magnetic field gets chaotic, with lots of north and south poles – so we still have a magnetic field, but compasses will be useless. And then it straightens itself back out, but with north and south reverse. This is actually similar to what the sun does – but the sun does it on a regular 11 year cycle. By the way – the you need to be careful how you describe the particles in the Van Allen belts – radioactive implies something like Uranium that decays by spewing out nuclear particles (alphas, betas) But the particles in the van Allen belts ar
