One tiny island got rich mining its own ground into a moonscape, then went broke

Nauru's entire interior was high-grade phosphate rock, and mining it from 1906 briefly gave its roughly 10,000 citizens one of the highest per-capita incomes on Earth. Decades of unchecked strip-mining stripped 80% of the island's surface to barren limestone pinnacles, and by the 2000s the phosphate had run out, leaving Nauru economically devastated and largely unusable outside a narrow coastal strip.

— Christopher G. Weeramantry, Nauru: Environmental Damage Under International Trusteeship — Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1992
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