We show that bubbling of almost-harmonic maps between 2-spheres has very different behaviour depending on whether or not bubbles develop at points in the domain at which the energy density of the body map is zero. We also see that this translates into different behaviour for the harmonic map flow. In [11] we obtained results, assuming nonzero bubble point density for certain bubbles, forcing th...

We establish various uniformity properties of the harmonic map heat ow, including uniform convergence in L 2 exponentially as t ! 1, and uniqueness of the positions of bubbles at innnite time. Our hypotheses are that the ow is between 2-spheres, and that the limit map and any bubbles share the same orientation.