We explore the evolution of a splash when a liquid drop impacts a smooth, dry surface. There are two splashing regimes that occur when the liquid viscosity is varied, as is evidenced by its dependence on ambient gas pressure. A high-viscosity drop splashes by emitting a thin sheet of liquid from a spreading liquid lamella long after the drop has first contacted the solid. Likewise, we find that there is also a delay in the ejection of a thin sheet when a low-viscosity drop splashes. We show how the ejection time of the thin sheet depends on liquid viscosity and ambient gas pressure.PACS numbers: 47.20.Gv,47.55.Ca,The discovery by Xu et al. [1], that the splash of a liquid drop hitting a smooth dry surface is suppressed by lowering the ambient air pressure, has galvanized research on gas-liquid interactions during impact. However, despite numerous experimental [2][3][4][5][6][7][8], theoretical [9,10], and numerical [3,11,12] efforts, the mechanism by which air causes a drop to splash remains unresolved.The situation is made more complicated, by the influence of liquid viscosity µ on the interplay of gas and liquid. At low viscosities, a beautiful crown-shaped corona emerges almost immediately after impact as shown in Fig. 1(a) [1,2]. However, a small increase in viscosity reveals a splash with a strikingly different appearance, that evolves much more slowly ( Fig. 1(b)). This higher-µ drop first contacts the surface and then spreads smoothly as a thick lamellar sheet. From this lamella, a thinner sheet of liquid is subsequently ejected almost parallel to the substrate. It is the thin sheet that eventually breaks apart to form the splash [4]. The existence of two distinct splashing regimes is made manifest in the non-monotonic dependence of the threshold pressure, P T , which is the ambient gas pressure above which splashing occurs, on the viscosity [2]. As shown in Fig. 2, P T decreases with increasing viscosity at low-µ, while the trend is reversed at higher µ.These differences have been taken to suggest that distinct mechanisms might underlie the two types of splash. Indeed, theories for low-µ splashes have been proposed that do not take into account any spreading of a liquid film on the substrate before the onset of the splash [9,10]. On the other hand, the fact that, regardless of viscosity, splashes are invariably suppressed when the ambient pressure is sufficiently low suggests that there may be a common mechanism for both the violent corona and the slowly evolving thin sheet. It is therefore imperative that one investigate whether the splash mechanisms in these two cases have common features even though the timescales for corona (or thin-sheet) ejection and the overall shape of the splashing drops differ dramatically. This paper studies the onset of thin-sheet and corona ejection in the two cases. As previously noted, at high-µ, thin-sheet ejection is delayed when the pressure is lowered [4]. The major conclusion from the present work is that this is also true in the low-viscosity regime. Corona ejection ...