Thanks to the advent of new and more advanced technologies, scientists are now able to determine precisely the extent and causes of Earth's short-term wobbling.

Our planet actually displays many different wobbling motions, ranging in period from a few minutes to billions of years. Some of these wobbles are the Chandler wobble of 433 days and the annual wobble, which together can tilt Earth's axis up to 10 meters from its nominal center.

The irregular and oftentimes short-term wobbles are harder to examine and study because these are overshadowed by the more prominent wobbles. But now Belgian and French scientists have taken advantage of a quirk in the pattern of large-scale motions and the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) to pin down short-term wobbles that occurred from November 2005 through February 2006. Why did they decided to use this method on that particular date?

The reason is because the Chandler wobble (a more permanent wobble) and the annual wobble essentially cancelled each other out, an event that occurs  roughly every six and a half years, allowing the researchers to focus on the short-period wobbles.

Over these three and a half months, the pole position traced small loops, ranging in size from that of a sheet of your usual bond paper (8-1/2x11 inch) down to that of a cell phone, and it remained within a one meter square during these four months.

The study doesn't end there. The study also wants to know why these wobbles occurred when they did. They are speculating that weather patterns in the northern hemisphere played a significant role in the occurrence of short-term wobbles. Also, the ocean could also affect such short-term wobbles since during the said period of study, they were able to correlate oceanic and atmospheric pressure variations with the small observed wobbles during the study period.