One Martian year later, a Curiosity selfie...

It's parked within reach of those two dark little holes in the lower left foreground which it drilled in a slab of limestone. This would imply the presence of a body of water for a considerable period of time. Since there isn't any here now, we can only conclude that some major catastrophic event caused its removal. An event perhaps like a meteoroid of between 100 and 200 Km in diameter hitting Mars and puncturing its crust about 3.5 billion years ago, as mentioned in the Larousse Guide to Astronomy. That could do it, and it would explain why the surface now is all beach and no ocean. And I can't imagine why anyone in their right mind would want to come to a place as barren as this, if we can learn about it with robots like Curiosity.

And speaking of pictures, I'd love to know if JPL assembled this composite image using Microsoft Research's Image Composite Editor (I.C.E.) which does this with multiple images. It works very well assembling panoramas consisting of both vertical and horizontal sets of images, and you can find it here.