Victor Vescovo

Victor Vescovo built a career in private equity while pursuing extreme expeditions on the side, eventually completing the so-called Explorers Grand Slam of climbing the highest peak on every continent and skiing to both the North and South Poles. Rather than treat that as a capstone, he turned to a challenge no one had yet completed: reaching the deepest point of every one of the world's five oceans.

Existing deep-ocean submersibles were mostly one-off vessels built for a single record dive and not designed for repeated use at extreme depth. Vescovo commissioned a purpose-built submersible, the Limiting Factor, engineered to descend to full ocean depth repeatedly and reliably rather than as a single fragile achievement, a significant engineering undertaking in its own right that involved years of design and testing before any dive took place.

Between 2018 and 2019, in what was called the Five Deeps Expedition, he personally piloted the submersible to the deepest point of the Pacific, Atlantic, Southern, Indian and Arctic Oceans, including a dive into the Challenger Deep of the Mariana Trench that measured slightly deeper than the point reached by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh in 1960. Unlike that earlier one-off dive, Vescovo's vessel's reliability allowed him to also carry scientists and, on later expeditions, other passengers to the same extreme depths, expanding what had been an isolated feat into something closer to a working research and access programme.

He has continued expedition work since, including deep dives to World War Two wreck sites, treating the submersible less as a personal trophy than as a tool other researchers could eventually use.