Herbert T. Ueda (April 17, 1929 - June 13, 2020) was an American ice drilling engineer. Ueda was born and raised in the Puyallup Valley in Washington. His parents were farm laborers, and were of Japanese descent. The Ueda family was interned in Idaho's

Minidoka War Relocation Center Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States. It commemorates the more than 13,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War.

for three years, beginning in the summer of 1942, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and signing of

Executive Order 9066 Executive Order 9066 was a United States presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States president Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. This order authorized the secretary of war to prescribe certain ...

. He was drafted into the Army in 1951 for two years, and attended the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

, first at Navy Pier and then at Champaign-Urbana, graduating as a mechanical engineer in 1958. Later that year he was hired by Lyle Hansen to work at the Snow, Ice, and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE). Ueda worked on the development of a thermal drill for SIPRE, initially under Fred Pollack; when Pollack left Ueda took over the project. It was tested in

Greenland Greenland ( kl, Kalaallit Nunaat, ; da, Grønland, ) is an island country in North America that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. It is located between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland is t ...

, at

Camp Tuto Camp TUTO ("Thule Take-Off") was a major U.S. Army operated research camp at the foot of the Greenland ice cap, east of Thule Air Base. It operated from 1954 to 1966, with revisits for follow-up research. History In the 1950s, Army research units ...

and

Camp Century Camp Century was an Arctic United States military scientific research base in Greenland. situated 240 km (150 miles) east of Thule Air Base. When built, Camp Century was publicized as a demonstration for affordable ice-cap military outposts ...

. in the later 1950s and early 1960s, reaching over 500 feet in 1961, over 700 feet depth in 1962, and almost 900 feet in 1963. At that point they began working on adapting a cable-suspended electromechanical drill, designed by

Armais Arutunoff Armais Sergeevich Arutunoff (June 21, 1893 - February 1978) was an inventor of technology for oil drilling. He was born in Tiflis, then part of the Russian Empire, into an Armenian family. He emigrated to the United States in 1923, and moved to ...

for mineral drilling, to be used in ice. A secondhand drill was acquired in 1963, and in 1964, when the thermal drill reached 1800 feet, they switched to using the electromechanical drill, and it worked well. After two more seasons of drilling it finally reached bedrock at about 4,550 ft. Ueda later described it as "the most satisfying moment of my life, or of my career". In 1966 and 1967 he was at

Byrd Station The Byrd Station is a former research station established by the United States during the International Geophysical Year by U.S. Navy Seabees during Operation Deep Freeze II in West Antarctica. History A joint Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marin ...

in the Antarctic, where the drill was used to reach 7102 feet at bedrock. After this he worked on building drills for other organizations, including

Ohio State The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best public ...

and the

Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions The Australian National Antarctic Research Expeditions (ANARE ) is the historical name for the Australian Antarctic Program (AAp) administered for Australia by the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). History Australia has had a long involv ...

(ANARE). He worked on the

Ross Ice Shelf Project Ross or ROSS may refer to: People * Clan Ross, a Highland Scottish clan * Ross (name), including a list of people with the surname or given name Ross, as well as the meaning * Earl of Ross, a peerage of Scotland Places * RoSS, the Republic of Sout ...

with John Rand in the 1970s, and then worked on the DYE sites in Greenland. He retired from SIPRE (by this time renamed to

Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) is a United States Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center research facility headquartered in Hanover, New Hampshire, that provides scientific and engineering ...

) in 1987, and worked for the Polar Ice Coring Office (PICO) for a while as technical director of operations, working for John Kelle. In 1989 he visited Greenland to work on the GISP 2 program.Shoemaker (2002), pp. 27–46. Ueda died of natural causes in 2020.

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1929 births 2020 deaths Japanese-American internees American military personnel of Japanese descent Grainger College of Engineering alumni American mechanical engineers American glaciologists {{glaciologist-stub