Where the Drops Used to Be

Dew drops freezing on a superhydrophobic surface give rise to percolation patterns with dramatically different morphologies from those on a regular surface. They seem to have no memory of the original spatial coordinates of the condensate. In the language of experiments and scaling laws, I will discuss the origin of this curious phenomena: how metastability, capillarity, and hygroscopicity of ice lead to droplet motility, disrupting spatial order, and giving rise to surface-dependent frozen architectures.