Surface ruptures database related to the 26 December 2018, MW 4.9 Mt. Etna earthquake, southern Italy

We provide a database of the coseismic surface ruptures produced by the 26 December 2018 Mw 4.9 earthquake that struck the eastern flank of Mt. Etna (southern Italy), the largest active volcano in Europe. Despite its small size, this shallow earthquake caused an impressive system of coseismic surface ruptures extending about 8.5 km, along the trace of the NNW-trending active Fiandaca Fault. We performed detailed field surveys were performed in the epicentral region to describe the ruptures geometry and kinematics. These exhibit a dominant right-oblique sense of slip with coseismic displacement peaks of 0.35 m. The Fiandaca Fault is part of a complex active faults system affecting the eastern flank of Mt. Etna. Its seismic history indicates a prominent surface-faulting potential, so our study is essential for unravelling the seismotectonics of shallow earthquakes in volcanic settings, and contributes updating empirical scaling laws relating moderate-sized earthquakes and surface faulting. The collected observations have been parsed and organized in a concise database consisting of 874 homogeneous georeferenced records. The main features describing the coseismic ruptures are the following: ID, time of sample collection, location (latitude, longitude, elevation), type of rupture, type of affected substratum, attitude (dip angle, dip direction, strike), surface offset (opening, throw, strike slip, net slip), kinematics, slip vector attitude, width of the deformation zone.