Nicholas Malczyk
Nicholas Malczyk
SM Stoller Corp. Groundwater Hydrologist
Nick’s undergraduate career as a Geology major was highlighted by work on a National Science Foundation project in Italy studying megacrystic subvolcanic rocks on the island of Elba, followed by a second project evaluating landslide hazards in New Hampshire. After graduation in 1999, his first job was as a field tech/geologist sampling soil and groundwater, and overseeing the installation of groundwater monitoring wells throughout Connecticut and Massachusetts.
I’ve started getting interested in the alternative energy field lately … an industry that has huge growth potential, especially in Colorado. The local universities are working with the national labs in the area to promote alternative energy under a program put forth by our new governor.
~ Nicholas Malczyk
Nick joined the SM Stoller Corp in Broomfield, Colo. in 2002 where he began work as a groundwater sampler at the now decommissioned Rocky Flats Department of Energy (DOE) site. Over the last three years he has worked at various DOE sites within the nation’s nuclear weapons complex. This work has included a three month/24-hour-a-day aquifer test at the Nevada Test Site during which various chemical tracers were injected about 4,000 feet below ground surface and tracked to model the groundwater flow. Nick has also worked on drill rigs to put in 4,400-foot deep wells at the Central Nevada Test Area, the site of the largest underground nuclear test in the lower 48 states.
In addition to hydrogeology duties, Nick as worked on projects studying the geomorphology and paleoclimate of the southern Great Basin, specifically inside the restricted boundaries of Nellis Air Force Base supporting Nellis’s archeology program that studies the Native Americans who were indigenous to the area.
One paper on this work is already published and another will come out in the near future. Nick has recently been involved in a study that conducted a differential-GPS survey at Mud Lake, near Tonopah, Nev., in order to calculate wind erosion rates in the central Nevada desert in conjunction with Carbon-14 dating of fossil stromatolites to determine the ages of the various Quaternary lake shores. Currently Nick is working on the installation and aquifer testing of ten 250-foot-deep dewatering wells at the Pantex DOE site in Amarillo, TX.
