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There, in rocks on the Gale Crater, Curiosity has found a surprising amount of manganese oxide – a mineral that is commonly found in lakes on Earth due to the highly oxidating conditions therein, which causes manganese crystals to form in the presence of oxygen.
"On Earth, these types of deposits happen all the time because of the high oxygen in our atmosphere produced by photosynthetic life, and from microbes that help catalyze those manganese oxidation reactions," Manganese oxide is common and abundant here on Earth, and intricately involved in biological processes to boot. It is an essential mineral for several human biological processes, but pretty muchThere isn't a lot of oxygen floating around on Mars now, and we've certainly found no evidence of living bacteria, so exactly how the manganese came to be hanging around there in sedimentary rocks on shoreline deposits in quantities comparable to an Earth-like environment isn't clear.
Where that oxygen came from is another question that remains unanswered, although it's possible that meteorite impacts early in Mars's history could have released oxygen from surface ice deposits.
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