# Sparta Aquifer The Sparta Aquifer is one of Arkansas's principal groundwater sources, underlying much of the southern, central, and eastern parts of the state. It is heavily used for industrial and municipal supply and has long been a focus of Arkansas groundwater-management concern. ## How it appears in the corpus The Sparta Aquifer is the planned cooling-water source for one of the two unnamed data-center projects documented in the [[Data-Center Cooling-Water Regulatory Correspondence]]. In January 2026, [[McClelland Consulting Engineers]] asked the Arkansas Department of Agriculture whether wells "pulling a total 4.32 MGD from the Sparta Aquifer" for "a future data center" would require State Water Compliance review. Department staff noted that the Sparta is a "sustaining aquifer," so wells drawing from it are subject to a metering requirement — but, as a privately owned data-center well, the withdrawal would otherwise face only registration and annual reporting, not Water Plan Compliance review (see [[Water-Use Registration]]). ## Stakeholders Industrial and municipal users across south, central, and east Arkansas draw on the Sparta. The Arkansas Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Division administers the water-use registration regime and the Critical Groundwater Area program that governs aquifer stress. ## Notes The Sparta is analytically load-bearing for the investigation because it geographically constrains the unidentified McClelland project: a planned 4.32 MGD Sparta withdrawal places that data center over the aquifer's footprint — south, central, or eastern Arkansas — and rules out, for instance, the West Memphis site, which sits over the Mississippi River Valley alluvial aquifer. See [[Identifying the Unnamed Cooling-Water Data Centers]]. **USGS monitoring context and a drawdown gap (Tier 2, added 2026-06-04).** A USGS Water Services query returned 30+ groundwater monitoring wells in Faulkner County operated by the Arkansas Department of Health and the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, but did not isolate a Sparta-coded (124SPRT) observation well there ([EPA/USGS water capture, Tier 2](../../web%20archive/2026-06-04/epa-usgs-water-connector-capture.md)). A quantitative **Sparta potentiometric/drawdown trend** — the measure of the aquifer stress that makes a 4.32 MGD industrial withdrawal consequential — was not pulled this pass and remains an open gap; the next step is the USGS NWIS GW-levels/DV service (`waterservices.usgs.gov/nwis/gwlevels`) for a 124SPRT-coded well in the relevant county, or the USGS Arkansas Water Science Center's Sparta potentiometric-surface reports.