This is the best summary I could come up with:
Curiosity discovered manganese oxide in bedrock in a Martian region that may have been a shoreline billions of years ago.
The manganese oxide was identified by Curiosity’s ChemCam instrument, which fires a laser at rocks that scientists wish to study.
“It is difficult for manganese oxide to form on the surface of Mars, so we didn’t expect to find it in such high concentrations in a shoreline deposit,” said lead researcher Patrick Gasda of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in a statement.
The manganese-oxide-enriched mudstone is coarser, with larger grains than bedrock elsewhere in the crater where only small abundances of the compound have been discovered.
“These findings point to larger processes occurring in the Martian atmosphere or surface water and show that more work needs to be done to understand oxidation on Mars,” said Gasda.
“Manganese minerals are common in the shallow, oxic waters found on lake shores on Earth, and it’s remarkable to find such recognizable features on ancient Mars.”
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