  Numerous natural and industrial processes entail the spontaneous entrapment
of gas/air as rough/patterned surfaces are submerged under water. As the
wetting transitions ensue, the gas diffuses into the water leading to the
fully-water-filled state. However, the standard models for wetting do not
account for the microtexture's topography. In other words, it is not clear
whether the lifetime of n cavities arranged in a I-D line or a II-D (circular
or square) lattice would be the same or not as a single 0-D cavity. In
response, we tracked the time-dependent fates of gas pockets trapped in I-D and
II-D lattices and compared them with wetting transitions in commensurate 0-D
cavities. Interestingly, the wetting transitions in the I-D and the II-D arrays
had a directionality such that the gas from the outermost cavities was lost the
first, while the innermost got filled by water the last. In essence,
microtexture's spatial organization afforded shielding to the loss of the gas
from the innermost cavities, which we probed as a function of the
microtexture's pitch, surface density, dimensionality, and hydrostatic
pressure. These findings advance our knowledge of wetting transitions in
microtextures, and inspiring surface textures to protect electronic devices
against liquid ingression.
