Twenty years’ worth of imagery captured by two orbiters circling Mars has revealed raging winds on the red planet.

Wind on the barren planet would be invisible if it weren’t for Mars’ iconic red dust, which was caught in the wind’s vortices, creating a phenomenon known as dust devils.

These tornado-like whirlwinds also occur on Earth, but the new catalog of Martian dust devils, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, shows that Martian dust devils seem to move much faster and are more abundant on a global scale, said lead study author Dr. Valentin Bickel, a Center for Space and Habitability fellow at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Researchers compiled the new publicly available catalog by using images taken by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express since 2004 and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter since 2016.

They trained a neural network, or machine learning modeled on the human brain, to spot the vortices in the orbital data, then checked each one to create a map of 1,039 dust devils across Mars, including examples atop ancient volcanoes and in open plains. The team was also able to determine the direction of motion for 373 of the rotating dust-filled wind columns.

They determined that the Martian dust devils and their accompanying winds can move as rapidly as about 99 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), much faster than any dust devils ever clocked by rovers exploring the red planet’s surface.

“This observation implies that those winds are likely able to lift a substantial amount of dust from the surface into the atmosph