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this is an obscured observation, and obscured observations have their location descriptions obscured to the name of the county-level “standard” place where the location occurs. in this case, the observation is in the ocean, and iNat’s standard places are land-based. so there no county-level place to match to this observation.
i don’t think this would be considered a bug, but i guess you could make a feature request to have it display something like “somewhere on earth” rather than “missing” or something like that. (i’m not sure what the best alternative text would be.)
the system doesn’t force the location description and coordinates to match. the location description is just text, and you can put whatever you like in there. in your case, it sounds like your location description is accurate, but you can see on the map that your coordinates are near Antarctica. so you just need to fix the coordinates.
since your (bad) coordinates seem to be in the middle of the ocean and your observation is obscured, you get the same problem as noted above, since there’s no standard place. but once you fix your coordinates, all should be fine.
the positional accuracy is huge on that observation. the only time i see that happen is when folks fat-finger the map when creating or editing the observation. you can fix that observation by just editing the coordinates so that they’re in California, not near Antarctica.
