The severity of the world's fastest-growing refugee crisis becomes even clearer when viewed from space.

An estimated 624,000 Rohingya refugees, a Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar's northern Rakhine state, have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since late August to escape oppression and extreme violence from Myanmar's military and Buddhist majority. Due to decades of persecution, nearly 1 million Rohingya currently live in Bangladesh.

New satellite images, provided to Mashable by commercial space imagery company DigitalGlobe, show the drastic changes to the Cox's Bazar landscape over a period of just four months, as densely populated settlements quickly began to cover large swaths of the region.

Aerial images like these help show the world what aid workers, organizations, journalists, and photographers have seen firsthand. Thousands of Rohingya refugees, many of them children, continue to cross the border into Bangladesh on a daily basis, as aid groups struggle to fill the needs of the growing population.

Read the full article by Matt Petronzio about the refugee crisis from Mashable