I WAS MEANT TO BE ON BOARD DOOMED TITAN SUBMERSIBLE

Ex-Royal Marine turned television explorer Aldo Kane thrives on danger. But after journeying to the ocean's depths to see how climate change has ravaged sea life, he reveals his luckiest escape yet was missing out on a tempting adventure

- James Rampton

FORMER Royal Marine Commando sniper and special ops veteran Aldo Kane has experienced his fair share of brushes with danger during his remarkable career to date.

The 46-year-old Scot has confronted narco hitmen in South America and been charged by a black rhino. He has been held at gunpoint and abseiled into an active volcano near the Congo River, where he was assailed by lava bombs and poisonous gas.

And, as he reveals to the Daily Express today, he was supposed to be a passenger on the Titan submersible which tragically imploded on a dive down to the wreck of Titanic last year, killing all five on board - of which more later.

Pushing boundaries is what Aldo specialises in. Not only has he broken the world record for rowing across the Atlantic - "It took 50 days and 10 hours and 36 minutes, to be exact" - he has also escorted celebrities to some of the most inhospitable places on the planet, having driven Tom Hardy across Siberia and accompanied Henry Cavill through China.

Yet this highly courageous ex-military man has just taken on his biggest challenge yet dropping 3,000 feet to the ocean floor in a tiny, three-person submersible. He took on this terrifying feat as a presenter in OceanXplorers, a major new six-part series executive-produced by James Cameron, the director of Avatar and Titanic. And it was an endeavour that made Aldo - who has been described by one publication as "quite possibly the hardest man in the world" - understandably anxious.

For the documentary, which was filmed in locations as diverse as the Caribbean and the Arctic Circle, Aldo travelled on a state-ofthe-art expeditionary ship called the OceanXplorer, boldly going where no one had gone before.

With fellow explorers, scientists, conservationists and filmmakers, he probed the final frontier of the world's oceans, 80 per cent of which are still completely unexplored.