The doctor who treated a helicopter pilot who fell and got wedged in a crevasse in Antarctica told an inquest he had hoped for a miracle as staff worked to keep him alive for 18 hours before his death.
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Captain David Wood, 62, died of hypothermia the day after he plunged about 14 metres into the chasm on the western ice shelf during a routine mission to restock a fuel cache on January 11, 2016.
His colleague flew back to Davis station for help and returned with a rescue team as Mr Wood waited, wedged vertically between the ice, for four hours.
He was taken to the base for medical treatment but died on January 12.
An inquest into his death in the ACT Coroner's Court on Friday heard heard evidence from three doctors involved in treating Mr Wood.
Dr Roland Watzl, who was at the Australian Antarctic Division headquarters in Tasmania, said Mr Wood was suffering "profound" hypothermia.
"You have to re-warm and if you see [heart] activity you've got a fighting chance."
Dr John Parker treated Mr Wood at the base and said he hadn't been optimistic about his condition.
He'd been told Mr Wood had suffered cardiac arrest after he was pulled from the crevasse and rescuers had tried to resuscitate him on the return flight.
"My heart told me this is not good and he had a poor prognosis."
But Dr Parker said he had hoped Mr Wood's hypothermia meant he would be in a "frozen" or "suspended" state that had protected his brain, as in a few "miracle" cases.
"I knew that the outcome was probably going to be poor but we would do everything in our power, and we did, to try and create another miracle."
He said doctors didn't perform CPR because they were hoping his brain had been preserved by the cold and if his brain hadn't been preserved, he was dead.
Dr Parker said Mr Wood's wife and son had called as he was being treated and he'd held the phone next to the man's head so they could talk to him.
Dr Watzl said it was difficult to say whether it would have been beneficial to move Mr Wood's body into a horizontal position near the top of the crevasse as he neared the top, given rescuers didn't known if he'd suffered other injuries to his lower body.
The inquest heard patients with hypothermia should be treated gently. Dr Watzl said some periods of "rough handling" were "not by choice but by necessity" when rescuers pulled Mr Wood out and performed chest compressions.
"I don't know which one is the greater evil. I suspect in the end it made little difference," he said.
"Essentially he was packed in, in ice, at minus 14 degrees and he was there for four hours."
The doctors said while it was difficult to say whether having an oxygen supply or a defibrillator on the helicopter flight back to the station would have helped, it was unlikely their availability would have changed the outcome.
Earlier, rescue leader Martin Benavente told the inquest he'd called out to Mr Wood from the top of the crevasse when his team landed and the man responded "in a muffled, incoherent way" over a period of time: "Just pull me out, just pull me out."
When they pulled him out he was not speaking and didn't respond to verbal stimulation.
"His breathing was ragged and slow and he was curling into the foetal position."
Mr Benavente had tried to resuscitate Mr Wood when he appeared to go into cardiac arrest once he was inside the helicopter.
The inquest continues in front of Chief Coroner Lorraine Walker next week.
