Then came Japan, which occupied the country during World War II, and continued the phosphate mining. The U.S. bombed Japan's airstrip on Nauru in 1943, preventing food supplies from entering the ...

Phosphate – a valuable substance commonly used in fertiliser – was first discovered on Nauru around 1900, when it was under German rule. It didn’t take long before the resource was ...

Until the turn of the century, it was the dramatic boom and bust of Nauru's phosphate mine, and the mismanagement of its considerable wealth, that captured global attention. Then, in 2001 ...

It was the only German warship to reach the Pacific in WWII - and it struck with ruthless precision.

Nauru is about 3,000km north-east of Australia. The island's main phosphate mines closed in the 1980s, though phosphate mining and exports resumed in 2005. The government estimates that secondary ...

In the 1980s, Nauru boasted one of the highest GDP per capita globally. However, this prosperity was short-lived, reports Daily Express UK. By the next decade, the phosphate reserves, primarily ...

A combination of greed, corruption, incompetence and mismanagement resulted in Nauru’s phosphate mining boom turning into a catastrophe for locals. Given the combination of an increasingly complex ...

Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.