The world's smallest island nation, boom to bust
A single raised coral island just 21 square kilometers — smaller than most airports — that briefly had one of the highest per-capita incomes on Earth from phosphate mining, before the resource ran out and left a moonscape behind.
Nauru's phosphate deposits, formed over millennia from seabird guano, were mined continuously from 1907 until the reserves were largely exhausted by the 1990s — for a few decades it gave Nauruans one of the highest GDPs per capita in the world. Independence came in 1968. Today the interior plateau, known locally as Topside, remains a stark field of limestone pinnacles where the phosphate-rich soil was stripped away.