Phosphate wealth strip-mined Earth’s third-smallest country
Nauru, officially renamed the Republic of Naoero in 2026, is a Micronesian microstate in the South Pacific about 300 kilometres west of Banaba, with Yaren as de facto capital. At only 21 square kilometres and roughly 12,000 people, it ranks third-smallest worldwide and is the Commonwealth’s tiniest member by both measures.
A fringing coral reef, bare at low tide, rings the oval island and has blocked any proper seaport. Inside a fertile coastal strip 150 to 300 metres wide, coral cliffs rise to a central plateau whose summit, Command Ridge, reaches 71 metres. Micronesians settled it at least 3,000 years ago. Twelve traditional clans, traced through the mother’s line, appear as the twelve-pointed star on the flag, and islanders once raised juvenile milkfish in Buada Lagoon.
Captain John Fearn of the Hunter sighted it in 1798 and called it Pleasant Island. Whalers stopped for water from 1826, deserters traded guns and palm wine, and a civil war raged for ten years from 1878. Germany annexed the island in 1888, ending the fighting and attaching it to the Marshall Islands protectorate. Paul Hambruch claimed the name meant I go to the beach, but linguist Alois Kayser called that phrase ungrammatical folk etymology.
Albert Fuller Ellis found phosphate in 1900, and exports began in 1907. Australia seized the island in 1914 and later ran it under a mandate shared with Britain and New Zealand. Japan occupied it from 25 August 1942 and sent 1,200 Nauruans to Chuuk, where only 745 survived to return in January 1946. In 1948 police fired on striking Chinese miners, killing two. Mining so scarred the land that Australia proposed moving everyone to Queensland’s Curtis Island in 1963.
Independence came on 31 January 1968 under Hammer DeRoburt, and locals took over mining in June 1970, briefly becoming among the world’s richest people. Reserves ran out in the 1990s, and squandered wealth brought crisis in the 2000s. A 1989 lawsuit against Australia ended in a settlement to restore mined land, and since 2001 the island has hosted an Australian offshore detention centre in exchange for aid.
Source: Nauru
